Weekly Climate Word: Place Pathology

For many of us, the lack of language to describe our difficult feelings about the climate crisis is one of the biggest barriers to deeper engagement with the topic. Often in my research, I come across a term that makes me stop and think “Oh, I’ve definitely experienced that before, but I didn’t realize it had a name.” While naming a feeling or experience certainly doesn’t make it go away, it can make it more approachable. If fear and sadness and hopelessness are keeping me from thinking deeply about an existential emergency that I’m currently living through, one that could potentially drive millions of species—including my own—to extinction, it’s probably worth my time to dig in and move through those difficult feelings and experiences. 

To help make more sense of these feelings and our shared but unspoken experiences with the climate crisis, every week I’m going to highlight a new word or concept I’ve come across in my research. These are the words that help me process my own ecogrief and anxiety and make it easier for me to consider the big and scary thoughts that we must face—and push through—to fight the climate crisis. 

Place pathology describes the experience of losing some or all of our connection to a place—an actual, physical space—because that place is now polluted, unhealthy, hostile, uninhabitable, or gone entirely. (Philosopher and psychologist Edward Casey coined the term and discusses it at length in his 1993 book Getting Back into Place.)

The relevance of place pathology is clear in Southeast Louisiana. The communities on both sides of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans—a place called Cancer Alley—house 200 (and counting) petrochemical plants along an 85-mile stretch and experience cancer rates that are 50 times higher than national averages. Most of the Cancer Alley fence-line communities (places that sit next to industrial complexes and are directly impacted by the daily operations of these industries) are black, brown, indigenous, economically disenfranchised, and historically exploited. That history of exploitation is clear in the image below. Illustrator Klara Auerbach’s map of Cancer Alley shows the placement of Louisiana’s chemical plants (red dots) in relation to plantations that were present in 1858 (yellow dots).

Klara Auerbach

Gentrification and tourism are other forces of pathology that can change a place beyond recognition or make it inaccessible or hostile for people long-connected to it. Geography also makes some places more vulnerable to pathological forces than others.

But as the destructive effects of the changed and changing climate continue, the experience of place pathology becomes more universal. You don’t have to live in an industrial sacrifice zone, or a city with crumbling infrastructure, or in wildfire-prone areas, or below sea level for place pathology to be relevant. The changed climate allows for wildfires in Louisiana and hurricanes in California. Deadly tornado and flooding events happen more regularly. Brutal heat domes linger for weeks, covering thousands of square miles—entire countries and regions. The changed climate threatens the currents and the permafrost we depend on. So unless you’re living on a different planet with an atmosphere whose CO2 levels aren’t 418 parts per million and rising, you’ve most likely experienced place pathology.

Maybe you’ve scrolled through videos of a town you recognize washing away, or you’ve read a terrifying report about the Gulf Stream collapsing. Maybe it’s over 100℉ for 28 days in a row with no rain, and everything you’ve planted in your yard or garden dies. Maybe you realize your children contextualize every new animal they learn as endangered or extinct. Maybe you’ve come home to a storm-damaged home. Maybe a place you feel connected to is rezoned, dug up, paved, and used to funnel resources out of your community. In general, place pathology is when you see a familiar place that you no longer recognize. It has been lost, usually to forces beyond your control. Even if you don’t acknowledge these experiences, they can still make you feel disoriented and really sad.

While learning the term place pathology will not stop climate change, it might help you process the experience of losing a connection to a drastically changed or destroyed space. Learning that other people who’ve experienced place pathology feel disoriented, depressed, estranged, and suffer memory loss might validate and put our own emotions into perspective. (Sadly, plenty has been written about this experience in the modern world, thanks to colonialism and capitalism.)

Being able to name an experience that causes such enormous feelings might help us through the existential creepies. It might push us beyond the temptation of unimaginative nihilism or the self-preserving distractions of modern-life. It might give us the agency we need to think, write, and speak about losing so much at one time. Or it will help us recognize the grieving we subconsciously do when the climate crisis reminds us that it exists. And these reminders will keep growing louder and more persistent whether or not we consciously acknowledge them.

I think place pathology adds something important to a more popular term: sacrifice zone. The connotation of sacrifice is noble, sacred even. Sacrifice implies that something was given up in order to benefit the greater good. The language raises more questions about what the industries gain in this arrangement than what the communities lose.

Place pathology doesn’t engage with what was gained on the back end of that sacrifice; instead, it’s a reminder that these landscapes are sick, dying, or altogether gone. It’s a reminder that there is a source of that sickness, a disease or pathogen threatening the health of the surrounding cells, which is something oil and gas and petrochemical companies don’t want us to consider. I think that’s what I appreciate the most about place pathology; the term in itself is a subtle push back against the aggressive false narratives and greenwashing campaigns that the most powerful companies in the world spend billions on every year.