A Critical Reading of Solastalgia Through Indigenous and Care Ethics Lenses
Date
Authors
Baker, Eridani
Jones, David Kukutai
Brannelly, Tula
Supervisor
Item type
Journal Article
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Volume Title
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Abstract
Solastalgia is the emotional response elicited by ecological degradation, originating from the concepts of solace, desolation, and pain. Climate change has profound societal and health impacts especially for marginalised communities who face food shortages, poverty and forced displacement. Indigenous peoples have deep relational ancestral connections with the land that are beyond connection to place, and experience unique intensified forms of distress resulting from environmental degradation. For Indigenous peoples, connections with land are disrupted through extractive politics such as colonisation and now climate emergency, legacies that leave deleterious effects on wellbeing. In collective Indigenous cultures, distress is embedded within wider contexts of community, history, and the earth itself. This paper critically reviews solastalgia from Māori and care ethics perspectives to demonstrate the power of adding relational, contextual, and embodied elements to the concept. This paper argues for the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge in the conceptualisation of climate-related distress. Māori notions of voice and place inform research approaches that are in solidarity with Indigenous voice to examine the impacts of climate degradation.Description
Keywords
4406 Human Geography, 44 Human Society, 1607 Social Work, 2201 Applied Ethics, 4407 Policy and administration, 4409 Social work, 5001 Applied ethics
Source
Ethics and Social Welfare, ISSN: 1749-6535 (Print); 1749-6543 (Online), Informa UK Limited, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), 1-18. doi: 10.1080/17496535.2025.2539837
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Rights statement
© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.