Home is a word we fold around ourselves like a blanket. It’s the smell of pine after rain, the angle of light through a kitchen window in late autumn, the creak of a floorboard that knows your weight. We build homes from memory and matter, stitching together walls and stories until something holds. But what happens when the ground itself begins to betray those stories? Climate change gets talked about in numbers—parts per million, degrees Celsius, meters of sea-level rise. Yet underneath those abstractions stirs a quieter crisis: the slow unmaking of our sense of home. Not just the physical structures, but the emotional and existential anchor that tells us where we belong.
I’ve been thinking about this as I watch the news from places I’ve never visited, and from places I know intimately. A village in the Arctic relocating because the permafrost beneath it has turned to slurry. A coastal town in my own country where the shoreline now chews through gardens that once felt permanent. These are not just material losses. They are fractures in the narrative of a life. When the landscape that holds your earliest memories becomes unrecognizable, or simply disappears, you lose a conversation partner. You lose the physical counterpart to your inner world.
The Geography of Belonging
Philosophers have long understood that we don’t merely inhabit space; we dwell in it. Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, explored how our first home imprints itself on our psyche, becoming a template for all subsequent shelters. The attic, the cellar, the threshold—these aren’t just architectural features. They’re psychic coordinates. But Bachelard was writing in a world where homes, however humble, tended to stay put. He didn’t have to consider what it means when the cellar floods with salt water, or when the attic is torn off by a storm that has no name yet because the naming conventions have run out.
Climate change introduces a new kind of homelessness. It’s not only the refugee fleeing a drought-stricken region, though that is its most acute form. It’s also the person who remains in place but watches that place become alien. The forest you walked in as a child is now a stand of dead trees, killed by beetles that no longer die in winter. The garden where your grandmother grew tomatoes now bakes under a sun that feels angrier than it used to. You are still there, but home has left.
The Body as First Home
Before we have houses, we have bodies. And bodies, too, are being reshaped by a changing climate. Heatwaves that press down like a hand over the mouth. Wildfire smoke that seeps into the lungs and stays there. New diseases carried by insects that previously could not survive in our latitudes. The body is a home we never leave, yet it’s increasingly under siege from an environment it co-evolved with but no longer recognizes.
This bodily estrangement deepens the existential dislocation. When you cannot trust the air you breathe, or when the summer sun becomes a threat rather than a welcome guest, the fundamental contract between self and world is broken. The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote about the body as our point of insertion into the world, the medium through which we have a world at all. Climate change makes that insertion painful, uncertain. It reminds us that we’re not minds floating above the mess of biology; we are creatures, vulnerable and permeable.
Temporal Displacement: When the Seasons Slip
Home is not only a place but a rhythm. The turning of the year, the reliable sequence of blooming and harvest, snowfall and thaw—these cycles weave us into a larger order. They give life a cadence that feels, if not eternal, at least older than us and destined to outlast us. Climate change scrambles these rhythms. Spring comes earlier, or not at all. Rains arrive in torrents after months of drought. The cues that told our grandparents when to plant, when to migrate, when to celebrate, become unreliable.
This temporal disorientation is a form of grief that has no name. We mourn the loss of species and shorelines, but we rarely speak of mourning the loss of seasons as we knew them. Yet that loss cuts deep. It severs the thread of continuity that connects us to our ancestors and, we hoped, to our descendants. If the seasons are no longer a circle but a jagged line, what does it mean to plan a life? To plant an orchard, knowing the climate in thirty years may not support it? To teach a child the names of constellations that will be increasingly veiled by wildfire haze?
The Unsettling of Memory
Memory is a landscape, and when that landscape alters, memory itself becomes untethered. I remember a particular bend in a river where I used to fish with my father. The water was clear and cold, fed by glaciers that are now retreating. I haven’t been back in years, but I carry that place inside me. If I returned to find it muddied and warm, filled with a different kind of life, I wouldn’t just be sad. I’d be confused. My memory would become a fiction, a story with no external referent.
This is the quiet violence of climate change. It doesn’t just destroy; it invalidates. It turns our memories into elegies for worlds that no longer exist. And because the change is incremental, we often don’t notice until the gap between memory and reality is too wide to bridge. One day you realize that the winters of your childhood, with their deep snows and long silences, are not coming back. And you wonder if you imagined them.
The Ethical Weight of Home
If home is something we carry within us, then its loss is not merely a private sorrow. It has ethical dimensions. The people who contribute least to climate change are often those most violently unhomed by it. Island nations watching the ocean swallow their cemeteries. Indigenous communities whose cosmologies are woven into ecosystems now unraveling. To lose your home is to lose your place in the story of the world. It is to become a ghost, haunting a landscape that no longer acknowledges you.
But there’s also a more subtle ethical challenge for those of us whose homes are, for now, still intact. We’re called to expand our sense of home beyond the walls of our houses, beyond even our national borders. The climate crisis reveals that we’re all dwelling in a shared atmospheric home, a thin envelope of breathable air and tolerable temperatures. This planetary home is being remodeled without our consent, and the renovations are shoddy. To care for it, we may need to loosen our grip on more parochial notions of belonging. Not to abandon the love of a particular place, but to let that love teach us how to love all places.
Solastalgia: The Homesickness You Have While Staying Put
The Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia to describe the distress caused by environmental change while one is still at home. It’s a form of homesickness experienced in place, a longing for the land as it was. The word combines solace and nostalgia, capturing the peculiar pain of seeking comfort in a familiar landscape and finding it altered. Solastalgia is becoming a pervasive condition, though we rarely name it. It manifests as anxiety, depression, a free-floating sense of loss that attaches itself to the weather forecast.
Albrecht’s concept helps us understand why climate change feels like a betrayal. The land is supposed to be the stable backdrop to our lives. When it becomes a source of threat—floods, fires, unpredictable storms—we lose a fundamental trust. We become refugees in our own houses, scanning the horizon for signs of trouble. This hypervigilance is exhausting. It erodes the capacity for rest, for the kind of deep dwelling that makes a house a home.
Rebuilding the Inner Shelter
Given all this, how do we live? How do we make a home in a world that’s increasingly inhospitable? There’s no easy answer, but perhaps the first step is to acknowledge the loss. To grieve openly for the places and rhythms that are disappearing. Grief, when shared, can be a form of communion. It can bind us to others who also remember, who also love what is fragile.
Beyond grief, there is the work of reimagining home. Not as a fortress against change, but as a practice of attention and care. To dwell, in the deepest sense, is to tend. To tend a garden that may fail. To tend relationships that sustain us when the physical world disappoints. To tend the stories that will outlast us. This kind of dwelling doesn’t depend on everything staying the same. It depends on our capacity to remain present, to keep showing up for a world that is breaking our hearts.
Perhaps the ultimate challenge of climate change is not technological or political, though it’s both. It’s spiritual. It asks us to love a world that is dying in some ways, being born in others, and to find our place in that transformation without losing our bearings entirely. It asks us to be at home in impermanence, which is a very old spiritual teaching and a very new practical necessity.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is solastalgia, and how does it relate to climate change?
Solastalgia is a term coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the pain or distress caused by the loss or degradation of one’s home environment while still living there. Unlike nostalgia, which is a longing for a distant place or time, solastalgia is the experience of environmental change happening right where you are. As climate change alters familiar landscapes—through drought, flooding, or species loss—people can feel a profound sense of homesickness without ever leaving home.
Can someone feel the loss of home even if their house is still standing?
Yes. Home is more than a physical structure. It encompasses the sensory and emotional landscape: the seasonal rhythms, the local plants and animals, the community, and the memories embedded in a place. When climate change transforms those elements—for example, by shifting growing seasons, killing off familiar tree species, or making the air unsafe to breathe—a person can feel displaced even if their house remains intact. This emotional dislocation is a central theme in the philosophy of dwelling.
How can we cultivate a sense of home in an unstable climate?
Cultivating home in an unstable climate involves shifting from a static idea of home as a fixed place to a dynamic practice of tending and belonging. This can include deepening relationships with the immediate environment through acts of care like gardening or restoration, sharing stories of loss and resilience with others, and expanding our sense of home to include the broader planetary systems we all depend on. It also means allowing grief for what is lost, which can open space for new forms of connection and meaning.
Is there a connection between climate change and mental health?
Increasingly, research shows that climate change affects mental health through direct trauma (such as surviving a flood or fire), through the gradual erosion of place-based identity, and through anticipatory anxiety about the future. Terms like solastalgia, eco-grief, and climate anxiety describe these experiences. Recognizing these emotional responses as reasonable reactions to real loss is an important step in supporting both individual well-being and collective action.