Every year there are new words, jargon and slang that sum up a cultural movement or explain new developments in our ever changing world. And while “bromance” and “crowd sourcing” share the lighter side of summation, Glenn Albrecht’s new term just as accurately describes a literally sadder development, “solastalgia”

In a recent Wired article, Clive Thompson gives a little insight into Albrecht’s newly defined phenomenon :

a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia. In essence, it’s pining for a lost environment. “Solastalgia,” as he wrote in a scientific paper describing his theory, “is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.’”

Albrecht witnessed solastagia in Australians when his fellow Australians described their deep, wrenching sense of loss as they watch the landscape around them change. Familiar plants don’t grow any more. Gardens won’t take. Birds are gone. “They no longer feel like they know the place they’ve lived for decades,” he says.

Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They’re suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven’t moved anywhere. It’s just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly.

It’s a new spin on a not so new problem–that one of the biggest ramifications of global warming may be that it will make us sad. We can count extinct species and read stories in the paper about melting ice caps till we’re blue in the face (and tisk and shake our heads ’til we gag) but the impact is finally starting to hit home and well, we’re already starting to miss it.

Warmer temperature zones have already crept north in America due to global warming and many plants and animals along with it. By the end of the century, the climate will no longer be favorable for the official state tree or flower in 28 states, according to “The Gardener’s Guide to Global Warming,” a report released last month by the National Wildlife Federation. That’s right, no more Ohio Buckeye or Kansas sunflower but palm trees in Knoxville and subtropical camellias in Pennsylvania. Not to mention new pests and weeds that thrive on greater carbon dioxide levels. More poisonous ivy and increased pollen from ragweed are hardly a welcome replacement to the holly and white Christmases of yore.

Clive observes that:

In the modern, industrialized West, many of us have forgotten how deeply we rely on the stability of nature for our psychic well-being. In a world of cheap airfares, laptops, and the Internet, we proudly regard mobility as a sign of how advanced we are. Hey, we’re nomadic hipster capitalists! We love change. Only losers get attached to their hometowns….”We like to think that we’re cool, 21st-century people, but the basic sense of a connection to the land is still big,” Albrecht says. “We haven’t evolved that much.

But while that “hipster capitalist” mentality may actually foster preparedness, planning and all sorts of “cool” if fantastical rubericks for a neo-New York, as a city still wrapped with self love and reverence for its history, we’ll still miss Coney Island when its gone. Perhaps it’s time to take a cue from Santa Monica’s support for native plant gardens and think up some creative solutions…while it’s still cold outside.