This compendium by the Land Body Ecologies collective explores solastalgia, the psychological distress caused by climate change, in land-dependent and Indigenous communities across Uganda, Kenya, Thailand, India and the Arctic.

When the land is sick, we are sick

For Indigenous peoples, climate change is one more catastrophic loss on top of decades of land abuses and intergenerational traumas. The exploitation of natural resources under colonialism has consistently marginalised and dispossessed communities around the world whose ways of life are based on the land. Environmental changes, often labelled as 'protection' or 'development' measures, have forcibly displaced many Indigenous people from their homelands. Extractive industries and neo-colonial green energy projects are altering delicate ecosystems, harming the health of both the humans and non-human beings that inhabit them.

This book examines where land, territories and the human body are sites of simultaneous trauma and the ways in which different forms of ecological degradation unmoor us. Starting from solastalgia, a form of mental distress caused by environmental change and one's feelings of inability to prevent or reverse land sickness, the Land Body Ecologies collective present reflections from people living through environmental changes, and propose cultural rights and practices as a mechanism for survival, revival and healing.