Sentience and Sorrow

Whether Earth has left the Holocene and entered the Anthropocene, an era during which human activities have profoundly and permanently impacted the planet’s systems and processes, is a matter of considerable debate. Part of the issue is that the International Commission on Stratigraphy requires a start date in order to recognize a new geological epoch, and even those who embrace the Anthropocene hypothesis disagree over when it began. Some say the advent of agriculture (10,000 years ago), others the Industrial Revolution (late 18th century), and still others the Great Acceleration or arrival of the nuclear age (mid-1940s).

While the scientific community considers the passage of geologic time, a 2018 poll by Yale University and George Mason University found that 71% of Americans believe global warming will harm “future generations of people […] and/or plants and animal species.” Experts recognize a range of human cognitive and behavioral responses to threat scenarios that include fight, flight, and dissociation. However, what caught my attention is the response known as “solastalgia”; a term coined by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht, it signals a “form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change.”

The human pain of solastalgia, which comes from living in landscapes altered by forces beyond one’s control, makes me curious about the psycho-emotional toll of climate change on other species. Plants are not sentient (though they have highly complex ecosystem relations), but research shows that domestic, companion, and wild animals think and feel according to their capacities. What do these beings experience because of disruptions to their environments?