Over the weekend, I set myself to read _Solastalgia_ (ed. Paul Board, 2023). The writing was sometimes really very good, and foregrounded a wonderfully wide range of voices, but I couldn't get past the undiscussed wall around it: all the writers wrote from places of privilege in North America, and mostly the USA. There were folk who had come from South Asia, Inuit lands, and Trinidad, but their endpoint, the place from which they wrote about loss, was never somewhere far away: they had a voice because of where they now were, and a certain unthinking insularity. And that felt to me, perhaps wrongly, as though it was reinscribing the same privilege that had led to the destruction that each writer rued.

By way of partial re-balance, here is a passionate essay by María Gamallo Planellas in El Salto about the devastating fires in the mountains of Northwest Spain. https://www.elsaltodiario.com/opinion/recortes-nos-queman.

But I wish we had much stronger voices here from Southeast Asia, from Africa, from Latin America, from my beloved Himalayas...

#solastalgia #decolonial #political_ecology #environmental_justice