A Home Between Environmental Changes and Climatic Anxiety

It is becoming harder to feel at home. As wildfires, floods, drought, and heat become recurrent rather than exceptional, and as everyday life fills with weather alerts, evacuation warnings, and preparedness drills, many people experience a particular kind of distress: the pain of remaining in a place that is still physically present but no longer feels safe, familiar, or trustworthy. This paper examines that experience through the concept of solastalgia—homesickness felt while still at home—and argues that it is not a private mood or a distortion of thinking, but a meaningful disturbance in the very conditions of dwelling. Bringing together phenomenology, emotional geography, and emotion-regulation theory, it shows how a pervasive “culture of emergency” reshapes the way we inhabit space, time, our bodies, and our relationships with others, narrowing the room we feel we have to live and act. Rather than treating climate-related anxiety as something to be corrected, the paper understands it as an honest response to a world whose stability has genuinely been compromised. It then asks how home might become livable again, arguing that repair must happen at several levels at once—personal, communal, and institutional—and that a workable sense of belonging can be rebuilt without denying what has been lost.