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.

The loudest conversations happening about the climate crisis rarely suffer from nuance. These most prominent discussions usually ask us to choose one of two options: doom or hope. And neither choice is useful in isolation since we are most definitely kind of doomed, and also there is still a lot to be hopeful about.

My window of tolerance with climate-crises news is wide, but I found myself turning away from the latest updates these last few weeks. My social media feeds are full of climatologists, oceanographers, biologists, meteorologists, climate activists-journalists, etc, so my curated-reality is supersaturated with climate news. Even so, "doom-scrolling” became more literal as many of the specialists I follow interrupted their usual messaging and allowed their inner-Cassandras/Chicken Littles to take over.

This week, the internet—the keeper of our collective consciousness—kept pulling my imagination to the five people floating in a tin can in a most peculiar way.

Weeks like this past one make it harder for us to keep one eye closed. When every major news organization features otherworldly pictures of the most recognizable skyline obscured by gray-orange smoke, we are compelled to look. Suddenly we’re all engaged in conversations about the climate crisis. But those conversations quickly die with the next unprecedented news cycle.

Our first experiences with the world become our first experiences with our own identities. We build an interior world that looks a lot like our early external worlds.