Already a whole decade ago, in 2014, Bethany Nowviskie's keynote addressed to digital environmental humanists, which she published with the title “Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene,” bluntly raised what the real issues facing us:

To make plain the premise on which this talk rests: I take as given the scientific evidence that human beings have irrevocably altered conditions for life on our planet. I acknowledge, too, that our past actions have a forward motion: that we owe what ecologists like David Tilman call an ‘extinction debt’ (Tilman et al., 1994, pp. 65–6)—and that this debt will be paid. (Nowviskie i4)

…alongside the myriad joyful, playful scholarly and intellectual concerns that motivate us in the digital humanities—or, rather, resting beneath them all, as a kind of substrate—there lies the seriousness of one core problem. The problem is that of extinction—of multiple extinctions; heartbreaking extinctions; boring, quotidian, barely noticed extinctions—both the absences that echo through centuries, and the disposable erosions of our lossy everyday. (Nowviskie i5)

There. She said it.

The problem is that of extinction.

The problem is that of extinction.

The problem is that of extinction.

We go to work, teach, make art, write papers, have holidays, walk our cities, while extinctions go barely noticed.

Nowviskie asks about what our work should be aiming to do, and her words are haunting. Read them twice:

What is a digital humanities practice that grapples constantly with little extinctions and can look clear-eyed on a Big One? Is it socially conscious and activist in tone? Does it reflect the managerial and problem-solving character of our 21st-century institutions? Is it about preservation, conservation, and recovery—or about understanding ephemerality and embracing change? Does our work help us to appreciate, memorialize, and mourn the things we’ve lost? Does it alter, for us and for our audiences, our global frameworks and our sense of scale? Is it about teaching ourselves to live differently? Or, as a soldier of a desert war wrote in last autumn’s New York Times, is our central task the task of learning how to die—not (as he put it) to die ‘as individuals, but as a civilization’ (Scranton, 2013), in the Anthropocene? (Nowviskie i5-i6)

Is our central task the task of learning how to die? Planetary extinction, floods, fires, destruction of all sorts: these are our reality, and yet the reality is unacknowledged. The country south of us has patronizingly dismissed all research that falls under what they call "climate religion."

After our own participation in the construction of two large digital works about crisis with the Decameron Collective, one about the pandemic called Decameron 2.0, and one about death and loss we presented last year at IFM called Memory Eternal, we were seeped in practices of collective and shared grieving and remembering. It seemed logical for Jolene and I to turn our attention to the polycrisis, undertaking work in contexts that leave us exhausted, impotent, and, often, mad as hell. We have been confronted with the inadequacy of our disciplines that say they’re attuned to matters of justice and ideology, and then can’t do anything practical at all.  We are confronted with the naivete and denialism of friends and colleagues and our own. But we’ve also also found that we’re more madly in love with the world, with all its beings that live in the air and in the water and underground, than ever before. To love and be angry, to love and be disappointed, to be puzzled–we realized we don’t yet have enough of a language for these experiences. 

A word came to Jolene from Glen Albrecht: "Solastalgia."

solacium (L, comfort) + algia (Gk, pain, suffering, sickness)

“Based on the Latin words for solace (solari), desolation (desolare), and pain/sorry (algia), solastalgia “rolled out of my mind and off my tongue as if it had always been there.” He writes, “I define solastalgia’ as the pain or distress caused by the ongoing loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory. It is the existential and lived experience of negative environmental change, manifest as an attack on one’s sense of place.” (xxii Bogard) .

This grieving and suffering, which lives deep in our bodies, is what we mean to access in this work, not knowing in advance what it will tell us or what it will mean, if it will mean anything at all. Some of what we're logging will be able come into language and some of it won't.

Different disciplines draw lines around the stuff we have assembled; affects; (in)capacties: 

"We breathe in jagged rhythms, taking in air charged with threat and promise. Bodies are pulled by tense, uneven affective lures: the weight of gloom and doom, the flatness of ongoing crisis ordinariness, the real pleasure, excitement, hope, and joy that persist. (Seigworth et al 19)

Jolene bought security cameras, technologies used for surveillance, discipline, and punishments, and pointed them at her yard, capturing a  magpie leaving a snow angel. She pointed them at the sky and caught the aurora borealis, and falling stars. She put a microphone in the snow and recorded the sound snow makes. Bringing what otherwise remains imperceptible into percepetion is a radical subversion of these mediums that are generally not used to bring us into relation with the world around us. These are also acts of love, respect, even devotion.

On the precipice of extinction, with grieving in our hearts, we ask what do we need to see, know, and understand but also what do we need to feel? We agree with Andy Fisher: 

...that the psyche cannot really be understood as a distinct dimension isolated from the sensuous world that materially enfolds us, and indeed that earthly nature can no longer be genuinely understood as a conglomeration of objects and objective processes independent of subjectivity and sentience. (Fisher ix)
 

The Cartesian frameworks, we've long known, don't work. We need to reach for other paradigms, ones that emphasize the relational.

Sources
Bogard, Paul, ed. Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023.

Fisher, Andy, ed. Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life. 2nd ed. SUNY Series in Radical Social and Political Theory. Albany: SUNY Press, 2013.

Richards, Kimberly Skye. “Solastalgia,” An Ecotopican Lexicon, Minnesota UP 2019.

Nowviskie, Bethany. “Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 30, no. suppl 1 (December 1, 2015): i4–15. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqv015.

Seigworth, Gregory J., Matthew Arthur, Wendy J. Turan, and Chad Shomura, eds. Capacities To Affect Up Against Fascism. Lancaster PA; Vancouver BC: Imbricate! Press, 2025.