What happens when the pain of a changing planet becomes a matter of state policy?

This book takes you on a global journey into the heart of the climate crisis. It explores a feeling many of us now share: solastalgia, the grief for a home that is changing and disappearing before our eyes. We begin in the sinking lands of the Pacific and Asia. We meet the people of Kiribati, who face migration with dignity amidst cultural peril. We see how Bangladesh is paradoxically 'drowning in resilience'. We analyze Japan's reliance on techno-fixes and its emotional fallout. Then, we travel to the burning and melting world. We stand with communities in Australia grappling with the trauma of “bushfire brain.” We witness Indigenous resistance against extractive governance in Brazil's contested Amazon. We see how desertification in the Sahel fuels a devastating climate-conflict nexus. The journey continues to the unfrozen north, where permafrost thaw in Canada erodes Inuit homelands and ancient knowledge. Finally, we explore Europe and Africa's fractured heartlands, from the shock of a collapsing Italian glacier to the memory of Germany's river floods and the psychological stress of “Day Zero” water scarcity in South Africa.

While many books document the physical reality of climate change—the parts per million, the rising sea levels—The Solastalgic State charts a different territory: the human heart. Its unique contribution is exposing the emerging field of 'affective governance,' the subtle and overt ways governments are now trying to manage, influence, and control the emotional responses of their citizens to ecological collapse. This book goes beyond the science to ask critical questions other works don't. How is our collective grief being politicized? Is 'resilience' a genuine strategy for empowerment or a new way to shift responsibility onto the vulnerable? By connecting our deepest feelings of loss and anxiety to the machinery of policy, it offers a vital, new perspective. It concludes not with despair, but with a powerful blueprint for a future where policy cares for both place and psyche, providing concrete recommendations for a more emotionally intelligent and just approach to the crisis.

Disclaimer: The author has no affiliation with any board and this work is independently produced under nominative fair use.

Social Psychology