The mountain face we used to climb, weakened by the melting of the permafrost. All these small things, all these elements of nature to which we become attached in order to recharge, to live our existence as serenely as possible, even as it calls on us always a little more to adapt.

You will tell me: everything is impermanent in life, so this is only a more pronounced version of that impermanence. True. But who has not, after a difficult day marked by disappointments, setbacks, unforeseen events or troubles of every kind, drawn from the tranquillity of a tree, a stream or the rustling of nature a moment of breathing before going to bed? That moment when we hold on to something we believed immutable precisely in order to find a way of reconnecting with the inside of ourselves, of telling ourselves that even if the world is not turning right, we can anchor ourselves somewhere.

So what will happen if the ground gives way beneath our feet? What role does this apparent permanence to which we cling play, and what effects could its disappearance produce?

Why the human being needs anchor points

In The Need for Roots, written in the last years of her life and published posthumously in 1949, Simone Weil makes rootedness “perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul”.[1] For her, being rooted does not mean only belonging to a territory. It is taking part in a community, being inscribed in a history, receiving something from those who came before us and being able to pass it on to those who will come after us. The individual is therefore never built in the present alone: they need continuity.

This is what makes her reflection particularly topical. For this continuity implicitly presupposes a certain permanence of the world around us. We become attached to a house, a village, a landscape, a way of living; we inscribe our own memories in them and imagine, sometimes unconsciously, that something of them will survive after us. Rootedness thus makes it possible to link the past, the present and the future. What happens, then, when this continuity breaks, not because we voluntarily leave a place, but because the place itself is transformed to the point of becoming unrecognisable?

Psychology sheds light on another dimension of this need for stability. With his theory of attachment, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby showed how much the existence of secure bonds from childhood onwards contributes to the construction of the individual.[2] The parent then constitutes a secure base from which the child can explore the world. It is obviously not a matter of directly transposing parental attachment to our relationship with nature, but of observing a more general mechanism: we explore and face uncertainty more easily when we know that something remains stable behind us.

Now this anchoring function can also be provided, in another form, by places. Environmental psychology has taken an interest in what researchers call place attachment: the affective, cognitive and identity-related bonds that we develop with certain environments.[3] A house, a village, a forest, a mountain or even a landscape can contribute to our sense of continuity. We do not merely inhabit places: as we accumulate memories, habits and emotions in them, they too end up inhabiting us.

This is perhaps where part of what we consider immutable lies. We obviously know that a tree can die, that a river can dry up or that a mountain can collapse. But we build our existence as if certain elements of the setting were bound to outlive us. Their supposed immutability silently contributes to that feeling of permanence which reassures us and allows us to face the many adaptations of a changing daily life.

What happens when the ground gives way

The 21st century upends this need for connection and attachment, because we see disappearing or being transformed before our eyes what we cherish, as if we had to endure successive bereavements — some quite real and lived, others still in prospect.

Following work carried out among Australian populations confronted with the transformation of their environment, the philosopher Glenn Albrecht highlighted the distress caused by the degradation of a place to which one remains attached. This is how he proposed the concept of solastalgia, which he defines 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 environment and territory”.[4]

This suffering is different from eco-anxiety, which is more oriented towards the anticipation of ecological catastrophes to come. Solastalgia is born of a transformation already lived: that of a territory altered by climate disruption, the collapse of biodiversity, pollution or other forms of environmental degradation. It can be particularly intense in those whose activity, identity or personal history is deeply linked to their environment, and can cause distress, a sense of loss and powerlessness.

The hardest part perhaps lies in the fact that this destruction is rarely total. Mourning therefore cannot take place as it would after a clearly identifiable disappearance. This can be related to the notion of ambiguous loss, developed by the therapist Pauline Boss to describe certain losses that do not truly allow the mourning process to be closed[5]: when a person disappears without their death being able to be established, for example, or when the loved ones of a patient with Alzheimer’s see the person they knew gradually disappear even as they remain physically present.

In the same way, very often, nature disappears neither entirely nor all at once. The forest remains, but it is stripped of a few trees. The stream flows in winter, but stops in summer. The birds are still there, but fewer in number. The mountain remains before us, but we know that it is being transformed.

If nature took on the appearance of an immense library, it would be a little as if we watched it empty of its books each day.

From these ambiguous losses and from this solastalgia there could then be born a humanity progressively uprooted, psychically destabilised by the loss of some of its anchor points. It then remains to imagine what the generalisation of these losses could produce on the scale of a society.

A humanity condemned to unrest?

We have always had to learn to lose. Loved ones, loves, situations, sometimes a house or a territory — during and after a war, for example. But these losses generally occurred in a natural environment of which we could continue to assume a certain permanence. We lost something during our passage on the planet. The singularity of the period now opening perhaps lies in the fact that it is henceforth a part of the planet as we know it that becomes the object of the loss.

And this difference could profoundly transform our way of existing.

Faced with this instability, as we can see, some already choose exile, seeking elsewhere the climate, the landscape or the living environment they have lost. Others choose denial, because accepting the transformation of their environment would amount to accepting the disappearance of a part of themselves. Some enter into revolt, seeking those responsible for a loss they judge avoidable. Others sink into powerlessness or distress, convinced that no individual action is equal to what is disappearing. Still others choose action, finding in the protection or restoration of their environment a way of regaining a hold on their existence. An intensification of these behaviours therefore seems likely as climate disruption and the collapse of biodiversity progress.

Now it becomes essential to take this mutation into account, because another transformation, more silent, could appear: detachment. What is the point of becoming attached to a place if we know that it risks becoming uninhabitable? What is the point of planting a tree if we doubt that it can reach adulthood? What is the point of building an intimate relationship with a landscape whose metamorphosis we already anticipate?

The human being could then become even more mobile, more adaptable, perhaps more resilient. But also less rooted. They would learn not only to change places more easily, but to no longer expect places to provide them with that sense of permanence which accompanied previous generations.

This detachment could moreover constitute a formidable paradox. For the less we became attached to places, the less their destruction would affect us; but the less it affected us, the less likely we would be to want to protect them. Psychological adaptation to an unstable environment could thus help us to endure its transformation while weakening the affective bond that drives us to preserve it.

This is perhaps where one of the least visible consequences of climate disruption lies. We speak a great deal of the transformation of temperatures, ecosystems, landscapes, cities or our modes of production. Much less of the possible transformation of our way of becoming attached to the world. An anxious, committed, hyper-adaptable or detached human being?

The question is therefore perhaps no longer only how the human being will adapt to climate change, but which human being this adaptation will end up producing, for it is with that human being that we will have to learn to build our future.

[1] France Inter, Philosophes, “Simone Weil, L’Enracinement”, 17 August 2025. https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/philosophes/simone-weil-l-enracinement

[2]Élisabeth Roudinesco, “Bowlby tisse des liens”, Le Monde, 6 February 2014. https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2014/02/06/bowlby-tisse-les-liens_4361368_3260.html?search-type=classic&ise_click_rank=1

[3]Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford, “Defining Place Attachment: A Tripartite Organizing Framework”, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 30, no. 1, 2010, p. 1-10. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494409000620

[4]Glenn Albrecht, “Solastalgia: the definitions and origins”, 17 December 2018, Psychoterratica (the author’s personal blog). https://glennaalbrecht.wordpress.com/2018/12/17/solastalgia-the-definition-and-origins/

[5]Louise Leboyer, “Ces micro-deuils fragilisent votre santé mentale en silence, voici comment les reconnaître pour s’en défaire pour de bon”, 10 July 2025, Psychologies.com. « https://www.psychologies.com/moi/se-connaitre/micro-deuils-fragilisent-sante-mentale-silence-reconnaitre-606050