Out of Eden

Typically, any new administrator who meets with us will at some point ask us what the difference is between geology and geography.  And we point out to them that geographers look at human environment interactions.

Makes sense, right?  It is not merely about humans and what we do.  It is not merely about the environment.  But, about that intersection.  Which means, well, pretty much everything.  (Therefore, to some, it can also mean it is about nothing.)

Now, what if that natural environment that is close to home--not far away like in the Arctic--is changing for the worse?  Like the paving over of wetlands, or seemingly permanently smoke-filled skies because of the cement factory in town, or ... you get the drift, right?

It is also easy to imagine that plenty of people get distressed over the destruction of that natural environment.  If only there is a word for that condition, you say?

While you won’t find it in the Oxford English Dictionary, philosopher Glenn Albrecht once coined one such word while working at the University of Newcastle in Australia. 'Solastalgia’ – a portmanteau of the words ‘solace’ and ‘nostalgia’ – is used not just in academia but more widely, in clinical psychology and health policy in Australia, as well as by US researchers looking into the effects of wildfires in California.
It describes the feeling of distress associated with environmental change close to your home, explains Albrecht.

The last two weeks here in Oregon made me feeling uneasy.  Forest fires all around the state were blowing smoke and fine particulate matter into the valley.  The blue sky and white clouds, and the hours outside, were gone.  The sun rose as an orange ball, and throughout the day its light was yellow and orange.  Sunsets were eerily spectacular.  People didn't stir out, and those that did wore masks to filter the air that they were breathing.  I couldn't even enjoy the simplest pleasure of walking up to the river, leave alone walking my favorite five-mile loop by it.

One day, I simply gave up.  It was a crappy day.

Turns out that I was down with solastalgia.

The symptoms include an underlying sense of loss, a vague sensation of being torn from the earth, a general out-of-placeness, homelessness without leaving home. ... Solastalgia is the unease we inflict on ourselves as we create a world we don’t want to inhabit, a world stripped of nature.

I am not even an environmental nut-case and I find that I suffer from mild solastalgia.

At least the deterioration in the natural condition around me was temporary.  After a few bad days, the high pressure system let go of its choke-hold.  The wind direction changed.  The temperature dropped.  The blue sky returned.  I said hi to the river.

But, what if the damage to the natural environment near our homes is permanent?  How does one recover from that?

 “Solastalgia,” Albrecht wrote, “is the pain or sickness caused by the loss of, or inability to derive solace from, the present state of one’s home environment. Solastalgia exists when there is recognition that the beloved place in which one resides is under assault.” The type of assault may vary. The force of the assault may vary. The loss and unease that follows in the wake of the assault do not.
Glenn Albrecht chose “solasta” as a new root word for two reasons. “Solasta” contains the sense both of “solace” and “desolation.”

Desolation is a serious condition, I would think.

The idea of solastalgia came out of a stripped landscape, that of the Australian droughts of the early oughts. They provided direct evidence of the mental health consequences of climate change. The effects were most acute among indigenous groups, scientists who confront climate change directly, and farmers whose land has been destroyed.

Understandable, given that indigenous groups and farmers spend every single day with the natural environment in ways that we city slickers cannot even imagine.

Solastalgia, the researchers concluded, appeared to “give clear expression, both philosophically and empirically, to the environmental dimension of human distress.”

Yes, empirically too.

Solastalgia is the latest human affliction, and like the other human afflictions before it, it calls out for a cure.

If you want, read that piece to find out how the market offers a "cure."  If you are like me, you will be even more depressed at that cure!

Censored: C****** C*****

Source

The guy who believes he was appointed to ruin the EPA and not run the EPA is pissed off that people are talking about c****** c***** when Hurricane Irma is knocking on America's doors, after flattening quite a few doors in the Caribbean.

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said that talk about how climate change has played into hurricanes like Irma and Harvey is “misplaced.”
Scott Pruitt, who has expressed skepticism on the degree to which human activity causes global warming, told CNN that the country’s focus should be squarely on the immediate effects of the hurricanes for the time being.
“Here's the issue,” Pruitt told CNN late Thursday as Irma was heading toward Florida. “To have any kind of focus on the cause and effect of the storm; versus helping people, or actually facing the effect of the storm, is misplaced.”

I cannot begin to understand why there is such a sustained denial of c****** c*****.  It seems like we can even remove quite a few words from George Carlin's list, but we need to add c****** c*****.

It turns out that even these hurricanes cannot and will not change the minds of the c****** c***** deniers.

"People are pretty certain of where they stand on climate change," reports David Koniksy of Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Affairs. "Extreme weather does not move the needle much."

Does not move the needle!

"One reason may be that people do not yet closely attribute many common types of extreme weather to climate change," the researchers conclude. "Perhaps (over time) these linkages will strengthen in the public's mind."

Perhaps?

I bet that the 63 million who voted for the denier-in-chief are blaming god, and not c****** c*****, as Irma knocks Florida around, and will thank him (neither god nor the president can be female!)

On the economic geography of health care

"Health care in America is in crisis" is a serious understatement. It will only get worse!

Consider, for instance, employment.  We tend to assume that health care is a growing industry and, therefore, that is where the income stream is, right?  Yes, jobs are there, but ...

Yet for every higher-paying job held by workers like nurses and doctors, more than six workers such as orderlies, phlebotomists and cooks make less than $15 an hour. Nationwide, 70 percent of hospital service workers make less than $15 an hour, NELP found. In the Midwest, it's 71 percent.

Now, the $15/hr might sound like quite a compensation to a person in Bihar.  But, ahem, a cup of coffee is not 15 rupees either; there is the cost of living:

Most counties in the U.S. have a cost of living across industries that isn't covered by minimum wage incomes, according to a recent blog post from Amy Glasmeier, a professor and co-chair at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's economic geography and regional planning Ph. D program.
For instance, in Chicago, a single parent of one child needs to earn $24.67 an hour to meet a definition of living wage, while a person living alone there needs at least $12.33, based on a living-wage calculator  developed by Glasmeier in conjunction with MIT.

At least the cities are better, when one looks at health care in rural America; "half of the country's rural counties now don't have hospitals with obstetric services":

Maternity care is disappearing from America's rural counties, and for the 28 million women of reproductive age living in those areas, pregnancy and childbirth are becoming more complicated—and more dangerous.

One important factor is nothing but dollars and cents:

If hospitals want to offer obstetric services, they need to be ready for a baby to be born at any time—they need to have a bed available, the equipment available for mom and for baby, clinicians and staff available that have the necessary skills. That's a substantial expense. If a hospital's revenues are limited because it has a low volume of births—as many rural hospitals do—or if revenues are unpredictable, that creates a really difficult administrative problem.

It is exactly in such situations that we expect the government to step in where the market fails, right?  Especially when you consider this: "Medicaid funds about half of all births in the United States, and an even greater percentage of births in rural hospitals."  So, if these health care services for pregnant women are gone ...?

State and federal programs to support the rural maternity workforce are crucial. There ought to be programs to support training in emergency births in rural communities that lose obstetric care, and to support the costs of providing maternity care in communities where there are willing providers.

trump and his 63 million voters can fix this all with a complete repeal of Obamacare, right?