Saturday 23 April 2011

Solastalgia

Completing a uni assignment and needed to find five different psychological disorders for a character in a screenplay. Found this in Wikipedia and just loved it.

Solastalgia is a neologism coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003 with the first article published on this concept in 2005.[2] It describes a form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change, such as mining or climate change.

As opposed to nostalgia - the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home - "solastalgia" is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment. A paper published by Albrecht and collaborators focused on two contexts where collaborative research teams found solastalgia to be evident: the experiences of persistent drought in rural New South Wales (NSW) and the impact of large-scale open-cut coal mining on individuals in the Upper Hunter Valley of NSW. In both cases, people exposed to environmental change experienced negative effects exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness or lack of control over the unfolding change process

Friday 22 April 2011

Lock Up! (your daughters?)



The house is a house with walls, floors, ceilings, doors and windows. Yes. We can lock it up and you'd need a crow bar to break your way in. A $30,000 mortgage to get us to this stage. Though of course most of our one income goes into paying for the house before it gets to the mortgage stage. I must catch up with just how much, probably more than the same again.

It's lovely to walk inside the house at the moment. The light is fantastic. There's almost a sense of reverence when we do. Because soon, at least not too far away, this will be our home and we'll no longer be the poor cousins living in the shanty town shed at the bottom of the block. The rooms aren't too hard to visualise in their finished form, and it's not going to take forever to get them to that state.



We're about to go shopping for a slow combustion stove and a solar hot water system and have them installed. (happy to hear suggestions on best brands for the stove) The laundry tub, the shower stall, the kitchen bench and sink, the ceiling Solomit lining, the power, which has all been run, 'lit up' as Trev says, a few more doors a fair lick of paint, the rest of the floors beeswaxed, oh heck, might stop the list making it's starting to get a tad long. Still, things that can be done pretty much in any weather and most of it while I'm at work :-)



N.B The photos are now old news, the floors are now complete as are the internal walls (thanks again to John Fibbens for his help). I'll have to get back out there for an update.