The Memory Generation

Episode 9: Pete Muller

INTRO

Rachael Cerrotti: Hey everyone, I’m Rachael Cerrotti. Welcome to The Memory Generation – a podcast about the memories we inherit and the stories that are passed from one generation to the next. Today we are talking with Pete Muller. Pete is an award-winner photographer, filmmaker and artist who has covered topics of war, uprisings, gender constructs, and social movements around the world. He regularly works for National Geographic where he is a storytelling fellow. In this conversation, we are talking about his recent project for the magazine about the concept of solastalgia. Solastalgia is a newly-developed word that speaks to the emotional and existential distress caused by environmental change. Pete spent more than 2 years traveling around the world to document communities whose home environments have significantly changed. 

Pete, like myself, is originally from Massachusetts. He now splits his time between New York City and Maine. Pete and I recorded this conversation on June 12, 2022 in Portland, Maine.

INTERVIEW

Rachael Cerrotti: We are sitting here in Portland, Maine. And I'm really looking forward to having this conversation with you today.

Pete Muller: Yeah, me too.

Rachael Cerrotti: So. Tell me about you. What do you do? Where do you come from? Who are you? 

Pete Muller: So my name is Pete Mueller. I’ve been a photographer for the last 15 or so years. And I guess I feel like I'm in some sort of a metamorphosis in my life and in my work, moving away from being a still photographer and gravitating much more into sort of interdisciplinary kind of storytelling. I come from a long tradition of people who practice the visual arts - including my paternal grandfather was a commercial vocational photographer. He was a Swedish immigrant. My mother was the newspaper photographer for the daily newspapers. I've just always felt that photography was a gateway to conversations. I like to talk and I like to hear people talk. And that form of engagement comes very naturally to me and photography came somewhat intuitively to me, but certainly not in the same way that I feel like communicating verbally feels very intuitive. So it was always almost this challenge of trying to become competent enough as a visual communicator to be able to have that as a component of conversations that I thought were worth having.

Rachael Cerrotti: Coming from a visual family, is there a memory that you can reflect on that you feel like has really shaped who you are and how you've gone into the work that you do. 

Pete Muller: When you mentioned the idea of inherited memory and how it kind of manifests for me, I think it has a lot of tentacles about art. My mother was the daughter of a quite well renowned abstract surrealist painter from Philadelphia named Leon Kelly. And he got a scholarship to attend the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts where he was learning how to paint and draw. 

Rachael Cerrotti: And what decade are we in right now? 

Pete Muller: This was like the nineteen-teens or early twenties. And it was at a time when the European art scene was really – there were so many sort of avant garde, amazing things that were happening and particularly in Paris. And after my grandfather had been studying for a couple of years at the Philadelphia Academy, he got a scholarship to go to Europe. And, he was learning a lot about cubism and abstract surrealism. And he spent a number of years there. He became fluent in French. Eventually, he ran out of money and things and he came back to the U.S. and he started implementing some of the artistic practices that he'd been observing in Europe back home. And so he became one of the pioneers of American abstract surrealism. And, I only met him like as a little baby, so I have no meaningful engagement with him. But he was one of these kind of artists that we think of almost as a caricature - incredibly recalcitrant, incredibly devoted to what he was doing. He was extraordinarily self-disciplined when it came to his work. I mean, he was up at the same time every day. He was in the studio early. He painted all day. He would become extremely devoted to these very types of visual exploration. He would do these lengthy studies on, for instance, on camouflage. He became fascinated with notions of camouflage and how to depict it in varying kinds of settings in his work and he would not bend his vision to anybody's requests. He was represented by what was at the time, the foremost dealer of surrealism in the United States, this guy named Julien Levy in New York City. And there are these letters, correspondence letters that are in books that have been compiled about my grandfather's life, where Julian Levy would be writing to my grandfather, saying, look, you know, you remember those series of paintings that you made that were a little bit different in this way or that way? Well, I had great success selling those. If you wouldn't mind if you could find it in yourself to sort of produce some more things along that line, we can sell them, we can make you some money - it's better for me. My grandfather wouldn't budge. 

Rachael Cerrotti: That conviction to his art, was that a story passed down to you and your family? Like, was that a well-known personality trait or did your understanding of him in that way come from researching him because so much was written about him? 

Pete Muller: There was a lot of distress, emotional, financial, sort of social stress around my grandfather's absolutely rigid notions of how he was going to pursue his art. Financially, it was really hard for them. You know, there was alcoholism and there was affairs and mistresses and all these things. So what I think I inherited from a man, you know, my paternal grandfather, a man I never actually met. I inherited a kind of memory about what art means in all of its challenges. You know, that was imparted to me that the world of art is difficult, it's cutthroat. It can be very discouraging. It can be extremely distressing, particularly financially. So as a creator myself, and I'm very reluctant to call myself an artist, although at this stage I feel like there's really no other term for myself than an artist. I am so reluctant to use it for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that that inherited memory of the emotional, financial and sort of practical stresses of what being an artist means in terms of relationships and love and connection. Obviously the world of photography differs considerably as an art form, if that's how it will consider it from other visual media where, you know, like my grandfather was making works that were motivated by the world around him - the birds and the insects and the landscapes and things that he saw. But they were distinctly different as a representation of that world. Whereas the photographic medium particularly by those of us who kind of come from the sort of world of photojournalism or documentary photography is in most cases a direct representation of the, quote unquote, real world. The reality in front of you people as they looked and existed on a particular day. It's intrinsically about the social realm. It's about the worlds that we're navigating and how we fit into them and how we record them and where we choose to point our lenses and all that. But it also is, of course, can be categorized in the world of art. 

Rachael Cerrotti: The most iconic photographs are one shot of one place that are cropped and seen by one person. It’s what they noticed and if you had put ten other people in that space with them, they all would have noticed something different. Photographers have formed our collective memory and our memory of war, protest and our memory of politics. And it's so much power in one single shot.

Pete Muller: And it's so intrinsically amazing and unfair in that way. We choose not only when to make an exposure with a camera, which will be, you know, fractions of a second. And then of course I'll then choose of many of those moments which one sort of quote unquote feels right. That editing process, selecting images. That's such an extraordinary power because these things can become so enshrined not only in our memories eventually, but they become enshrined in our understanding of, like the modern moment, what's happening around us. And so if we're not shooting the pictures in a fair and correct way and then not selecting the pictures in a fair and correct way, we're doing such a disservice to our understanding, to people's understanding of what and how the world is. I was based overseas for almost 15 years and was working in a lot of places that I could sort of assume that at least the target audience for a lot of my photography, which was mostly American newspapers or global wire services or mostly a kind of Western audience and I could sort of safely make an assumption that a considerable number of those people had never and probably would never actually go to the places where I was reporting from or I was making photography from. And so I often felt that I as a photographer out in these social worlds beyond the kind of lived experiences of most of the presumed consumers of these pictures, I was really involved in engaging people's imagination. Because based on my pictures, they're going to imagine what happened before that frame, what happened after that frame? Who is this kind of person? What are these dynamics? And so I became almost obsessive about the idea of ‘am I responsibly encouraging imagination’ because it's going to happen intrinsically. When people look at pictures, they're going to imagine and I think I've felt that a considerable part of my role, or at least my ambition within my role, is to encourage a responsible imagination.

Rachael Cerrotti: That feels like a good space to talk about a recent project that you worked on. So for two years, you worked on this project for National Geographic about this concept of solastalgia. And this was a project you worked on between 2017-18-19? Like those years? 

Pete Muller: Yeah. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Give us a bit of background On what is solastalgia? 

Pete Muller: I was visiting my mother in Massachusetts some years back and we were sitting on the - in the living room watching a documentary on the National Geographic Channel, I think and it was about drought in California. And in it there was this guy that started talking about this concept of solastalgia that people were experiencing solastalgia and I thought solastalgia - what the - what is that? And I came to find that there was like all this conversation about this seemingly esoteric, made up word that had made its way into this documentary film and had clearly made its way out into the digital ether. There was a lot of discussion about the applicability of this concept. There was artwork being made about it. There were conferences being organized around it. People were writing academic papers so as I dug around, I came to understand that this word, solastalgia, was a creation of this Australian environmental philosopher named Glenn Albrecht, who had been sort of steeped for decades in eco philosophies and things and was really concerned with the mental and social implications of major forms of what he would consider sort of negative transformation to environment. So, Glenn Albrecht had joined with a couple of other colleagues to do a sort of social impact survey of the experiences that the population was having in this area of Australia called the Upper Hunter Valley. It's about three and a half hours north of Sydney and there was a huge expansion of open pit coal mining that was happening there at the time. They discovered these huge deposits of really high quality coal underneath the floor of this valley, which was very bucolic and beautiful and rural and the place that had sort of remained that way for most of its modern memory. And the discovery of this coal just meant that they're just like blasting these extraordinary holes that are so big they're visible from space. And, they're going down to fully excavate these coal seams. And so, that processes all this extraction. And you have to take away all of what's called overburden, which is the stuff that lays on top of the coal seams the earth. And that, of course, has to go somewhere. So there's this kind of profound topographic transformation where you had these huge holes, where there hadn't had been holes, then these huge mounds of overburden that had come out from the holes. So the whole place just started to kind of look different, let alone all of the noise pollution and light pollution, all these things that were suddenly this incredible force that was so different than the characteristics of what the place had been. So Glenn and his colleagues were really interested in this sort of impacts on people. And Glenn, through that time, kept hearing common stories from residents who were living around the mines. And they seemed to really, really struggle to try to explain to him how they were feeling as a result of all this. So they'd go to great lengths. They'd just be talking and talking, trying to sort of communicate what he ultimately determined seemingly was something common among them, which was that, of course, they felt angry that the place was changing, but they felt this sort of - it was definitely a loss. And it was like homesickness, seemingly. But they were all home. They were all where they belonged. So it was like they were homesick for a place that they still were in. It's like the place had transformed so radically around them that while their boots were where they sort of belonged, so to speak, the place had been stripped of all of the characteristics that gave them that sense of comfort and familiarity. So he started to notice this as a commonality and he started thinking that perhaps it's that people have to be so verbose, they have to say so much to attempt to communicate this because there's no linguistic shorthand that exists as a concept and a representative word that encapsulates this feeling of sort of being homesick at home or very destabilized by major forms of physical transformation that are happening around you. Maybe there should be a word for this phenomenon. And so he set about trying to create one which really is a kind of remarkable endeavor. I never thought too much about where words come from prior to this.

Rachael Cerrotti: And so he comes up with this word Solastalgia.

Pete Muller: Yeah. There's an interesting kind of back story to it, which is that. So the word nostalgia kind of kept coming up. But this feeling was very much rooted in the present. So there was a sort of nostalgic element of the better days, but there was this contemporary wounding that was part of it. And it had a lot of implications for the future also because not only were people contending with the loss of this environment that had facilitated all of their social interplay and the lives that they were living on this physical ground, they were also contending with the fact that because it had changed so much, the social fabric had been torn apart so much. Lots of people were leaving and moving and getting away from all of this destructive stuff that they were really reconsidering their futures to. So there were all of these elements of it that made it feel not really aligned with what we think of as nostalgia — literally the pain to return. “Nostos” to return. “Algos” pain. An experience of physical displacement. But it still didn't feel sufficient to Glenn Albrecht as like a description of what people were really experiencing. So he thought since it's connected, the idea of nostalgia is connected to what people are experiencing. There should be some ghost reference. He's like, this is not about a return to any place because this is an in-placed experience. This is an experience that you have a sense of loss that you have while you are where you belong. And so he really thought, well, this is something that's deeply connected to a notion of home, as it were. And what are our homes? Our homes, he would say, are something that fundamentally give us a sense of comfort. So he was thinking, chewing on this idea of home and comfort, and he couldn't quite figure out how to like marry that up. So, Glenn sat down with his wife, who has been so instrumental in helping him think through these ideas, and they took out a thesaurus and they looked up the word comfort in the thesaurus. And there they saw a synonym for comfort as solace. And so he thought, well, maybe that works. You know, we could call it solastalgia - longing for a sense of comfort that's been stripped away by virtue of negative environmental transformation.

Rachael Cerrotti: And it's specifically about issues around climate change, global warming or human destruction of the environment. Like it's very specific about the land, right? 

Pete Muller: It originated in this context of yeah, like what people would call anthropogenic, like physical change - people digging big holes to get at coal. It wasn't really about climate change, but it was about major transformation to the environment around the people. But what's interesting, I think about any endeavor to create a word is you create it in one context and then you sort of give it to the world. And in giving it to the world, you have to understand that any new word as a yet undefined concept, people are going to sort of make it their own. And they're going to use it in various ways that, hopefully are in line with what you set out to do, but sometimes not. And that's really what's so kind of historically interesting about the interplay of the creation of words. It is very much that way. Somebody in some usually a kind of esoteric kind of environment creates a concept and then it sort of germinates a little bit. And maybe a journalist or somebody is like, Oh, that's kind of interesting. And so then they write a story about it, and then people read that story and then they make something about it. It's this kind of hard to predict interplay between all of these varying forces that are recognizing that a word has been created for something and then sort of debating and kicking the wheels of of what this means. 

Rachael Cerrotti: And that's what you did with it. You heard this word in a documentary, your interest was piqued. And then that set you off on a multi-year journey around the world to visit various communities that had some sort of story to attach to this word, even though they didn't know this word yet. So just take me. Where did you go?

Pete Muller: Well, I wanted it to be really quite geographically spread out. I wanted it to be partially in the global south, partially in the global north. I wanted it to be an industrialized countries and less industrialized countries. You know, I wanted to have quite an array - in indigenous communities and in communities of people who were more connected to the sort of settlement colonization process so that there was a sort of varied level of perspective because we're fundamentally dealing with questions related to land and place. So, I wanted to make sure that it encompassed a lot and that it could represent a lot. So, yeah, I ended up working in the Peruvian Andes a little bit. I worked on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. I worked in Paradise, California. I worked in this area called Chukotka, which is a very far northern part of Russia, sort of near where Alaska and Russia come together. And I worked in, in Australia in the Upper Hunter Valley, where the concept originated. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Was Australia your first stop? Because that's where it originated. 

Pete Muller: Yeah, I did go to kind of make a sort of inaugural good faith, like pilgrimage to the philosopher, to sort of not kiss the ring necessarily, but say, man, you know, I'm about to devote a considerable amount of my time and my life and my energies to this concept. And I think if I'm going to do that, I really ought to sit down with the guy who created it and make sure that there was something good kind of chemistry between us. So I went to meet Glenn and shake his hand and kind of look him in the eye and feel if there was good juju.

Rachael Cerrotti: So as you started digging into this topic and you started exploring it with these diverse communities. What were some of the things that you were finding in the way that solastalgia relates to the memory of those communities? Because we're talking about the actual geography changing. So it's not like one person is losing their house in the fire, right. You talk about Paradise, California. I know that that community burned to the ground. And so you're talking about an entire community coming together. And so the memories are different when you share them with other people.

Pete Muller: Definitely. And I'd say that it seemed, at least in what I observed and gleaned from people by talking to them at length, you know, I mean, that was a considerable part of this project was recording people's descriptions of how it felt. And it's such a crazy endeavor to be like, tell me how does this relate to or how does it compare to - how is it the same or different from like other forms of grief? We had a lot of - a lot of interesting, lengthy conversations. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Are there any that stand out?

Pete Muller: I was really moved by a guy who I actually didn't spend that much time with. This place that I worked on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana is sort of an infamously known place. There's been a lot of journalism around. It's called Isle de Jean Charles. And it's a coastal island that's lost 98% of its landmass over the last 50 years as a result of coastal erosion, rising sea levels. And there was a lot of dynamics that related to natural gas exploration there that facilitated a lot of this land loss. But causes aside, they've lost this huge portion of what they used to live on. And it's a Native American community that lives there - the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw community. And as I understood from the community elders and historians, this was a sort of faction of the Choctaw community that when the Indian Removal Act was signed in, I think 1830 and the Trail of Tears began driving the Choctaw communities from the east west across the Mississippi River, ultimately destined for the reservations in Oklahoma, this contingent of Choctaws split off from that and sort of took refuge down south in Louisiana in the bayous and hid out there. And they ended up linking up with French pirates these sort of mercenary like elements of the French colonial project that were there. And there was a fair amount of intermixing that went on to create this sort of contemporary Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw community. So I was spending time there, hanging around with people, having these longer conversations. And one day I was driving by and there was this young guy sitting out in front of his place and he was like shucking oysters, I think. We started talking. He was like playing music on his radio. And he was 22 years old at the time. His name was Voshon DarDar. And I asked if he could show me around a little bit. His younger brother was there and he sort of took me back into this area that they had sort of had like an old fort back there. And they had these couches sitting outside. And at this point, it was all overgrown and things and we sat out there and this guy, 22 years old, was such an old soul in the way that he was talking about this place, how beautiful it used to be and how connected he felt. He said it's so peaceful down here, so quiet, so few lights. You can see the stars so clearly. And I have all these incredible memories of how vibrant the place was when I was a kid, how alive it felt. I mean, it's filled with trees and migratory birds and all this biodiversity is unbelievable and a considerable amount now of the trees have died because there's been all of this saltwater intrusion because of the coastal erosion. And I remember Voshon was saying, like, you know, now it's like everything's dead now. And I always kind of wanted this to be part of my life going forward. And I don't know where it's going, but I certainly feel this - he felt something, you know, and that's a considerable part of what I was trying to understand is telling people the story of Glenn like, hey, how are you feeling? Let me tell ya, there's this guy out there who's created this concept and let me tell you what this concept is and what he's intending with it. And let me tell you a little bit about how it's like buzzing on the Internet, in the art world and whatever. What do you make of this? And I was really impressed by the degree to which so many people were like, wow, that feels right to me. 

Voshon DarDar (recorded by Pete): We're going to lose all this land. To me, it's like last of a dying breed, bro. Just in a little time, you know, just me being 22 years old, man, just in that little time I noticed a lot of houses - just, just how the land grow is so much different. You know, it used to - it's like all the trees and stuff is dead now. And, you know, I love this place, bro, and you know, just seeing it - keep losing the battle and losing a battle. Yeah, it's a hurt to your soul, bro. Man, it’s so beautiful out here sometime, man. It hurts to see that go, bro. And knowing we might have to leave, it hurts bro. Because I love this place, man. You know, you taking something I love and just mother nature taking it at this point and, yeah, it’s feeling like I lost a loved one almost right now. I know when I was a kid, I definitely planned on living out here and I wanted to live down here, you know, But I started realizing with all the old folks are saying, you know, that one day the land might be taken by water and stuff and I don't think I'm ever feel like this again anywhere I go, bro. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Did you get the sense that suddenly they felt seen in a new way?

Pete Muller: Definitely. I mean, this really cool woman also down on Isle de Jean Charles - Chantel Cammerdale, who is an organizer and activist. She grew up on the island. Her grandmother was one of the oldest people on the island. She unfortunately passed away not so long ago, but Chantel is super involved in the sort of organizing around the island and the relocation efforts that are being made to take the inhabitants off should they want to go and resettle them in some place. But Chantel was telling me this interesting story where, you know, they're in a unique situation in Isle de Jean Charles and that they had applied - there was a federal government grant for the relocation of these people, and they got all this buzz in the media like, Oh, these are the first climate change refugees or whatever. But there was some competition, unfortunately, between a couple of communities for this resettlement grant and it was awarded to the people in Isle de Jean Charles over this community in Newtok, Alaska. But somehow through the process there was a convening of those two groups. And Chantel, she said, it was so amazing for us to sit with those people who are also experiencing something so similar to what we're experiencing. She's like, man, all of a sudden I just felt like, ‘Wait a minute. This isn't just going on in my head. I'm not crazy and I'm not alone. Like, this is real. They feel it too. They feel what we feel.’ Just that realization of the commonality between her and that other community, I think was like incredibly alleviating in terms of the stress that's only multiplied by a feeling that you're going through that stress alone.

Chantel Cammerdale (recorded by Pete): It is something totally different than any other pain because it's not like, I can't just go to anybody and say, you know, the pain of losing a loved one or whatever, you know, this sort of pain of losing a land and the things you're surrounded by the land Going through this process, we've met other communities and there's a community in Alaska who's had the same thing and we were able to sit down and talk about things and it was almost exactly the same feelings, the same emotion that they went through is the same thing that we're experiencing. And it was just an instant connection because we have that - we both recognize that, that, that we have that thing in common. I think having those terminologies and those things in place, whatever other folks are going to start to go through this, it gives them a way to say, okay, wait, look, let me look this up. I'm not by myself. You know, it might help other communities cope better and faster with what's going on. 

Rachael Cerrotti: How does this emotion work in the intergenerational space. Like, can a father and a son have the same experience with solastalgia? How does this play out between generations?

Pete Muller: That's a really good and important question. I don't feel like I really have much of an answer on that. I mean, I observed some things that I thought were interesting and that, you know, I think a concept like solastalgia - it's to some extent dependent on the individual’s sort of purview. Like, did they know it as it was? And are they seeing it now as it is? If it's perceived to be a negative change, then, you know, a feeling like what solastalgia describes is entirely possible. I remember when I was in the Upper Hunter Valley, I was spending some time with this guy named Wayne, who was sort of an older guy who lived there, and he had a number of kids. And he himself had been a coal miner. And then he kind of turned against the coal companies because he felt like they were just absolutely demolishing this valley. And he was really active and quite vitriolic in his resistance to what was happening with the expansion of the mines and he told me about a dream he had. And in the dream, he goes up to this mountain behind his house where he lived with his family. And in the dream, he turns and he sees that all of a sudden, all the view and all the land that can be seen from the top of that mountain had just been absolutely pulverized by these open pit mines. And me, and Wayne and his son took a hike up to this place that was sort of playing this location in his dream. It’s a real place. And we hiked up there, the three of us - it was cool to be talking with his son who was 16 years old. And we got up to the top and Wayne looked out and he said, look, you can see the mines. And sort of in my impression as someone who's not from there and hadn't known it previously myself, they’re visible on the landscape, but they didn't seem extraordinary. You know, it didn't seem like this kind of remarkable, very disruptive pit that was like kind of right there, very present. But to him, it was like a cancer, it was something that really disrupted what he'd known is the sort of unblemished, bucolic landscape. And I asked his son, what do you think? How do you feel? He's like, man, I've never known it any other way, you know? And I like it here. I like coming up here. The mines don't really bother me in the same way. I know that they're not good for us. I know there’s - they're doing things that are negative in terms of our air quality and some of the implications and stuff. But as a feature of the landscape and how I feel about it, I just sort of I've never known it any different.

Wayne Riley (recorded by Pete): I spent nearly all my whole life in the mining industry. I did my apprenticeship underground as electrician. I had a dream that I was on this property and it didn't look the same as a property here. It was similar. When I got to the top of this ridge line, I looked over and there was this enormous mine hall. Not dissimilar to what we see on the side of the highway now. And I thought, you got to be kidding me. If these mines keep expanding and we keep making ridiculous decisions based on money rather than the reality of what we've got, potentially we could lose it.

Rachael Cerrotti: So you're working on this project and spending considerable amount of time in these communities. What was the end goal of working on this project?

Pete Muller: The end goal for me was to try to understand what the sort of changes that we’re seeing in the world were doing to people on an emotional level. There's been so much work across all different types of disciplines about, kind of realities of these various forms of environmental transformation - rising sea temperatures, melting sea ice, increasingly intensified storms. There's an incredible amount of data out there. You know, I think there's a kind of a hopelessness over, geez, all right, these things are so huge. There's nothing that one individual can, like, do to really make a notable impact and I was thinking, is there a more humanistic way into this that we're maybe overlooking? And here's this guy with this interesting endeavor to create a word to describe a phenomenon that's very connected to the emotional impacts of all this expanded and accelerated environmental change. And with the creation of that, does that allow us to see dimensions of the impacts that we're currently not seeing because we don't have words for it? Without a word for something we can kind of know that it's there. We can feel it, but it's hard to like point at it because it's sort of in the ether and once something is named, it becomes so crystal clear. And then you can really see manifestations of it everywhere. Even the term mansplaining, you know, there's a concept that certainly people new and experienced for ages particularly women, you know, could converse and say you know how that guy is and how he goes on and whatever. And it was a recognizable phenomenon, but without a name, there was no real, like, kind of lightning rod to immediately say, bam, that's it. And once there was a creation of that term.

Rachael Cerrotti: It was everywhere

Pete Muller: Everywhere.

Rachael Cerrotti: Everywhere. 

Pete Muller: Yeah. And think about that. Think about the power of that. Once there's a word for something, particularly if it's something that we're like, well, this isn't a good thing. Once there's a word for it and we can see it so clearly, we can start making efforts, perhaps, to change it. Without being able to really recognize it for what it is, it's extremely difficult to address anything - particularly things in the emotional realm. They're intrinsically invisible. And the only way to be able to, you know, figuratively see them is to have terminology that allows you to say it. And that we have an agreed upon idea that, okay, if I say solastalgia and at some point when that concept is fleshed out enough that when I say it, you know exactly where I'm at. I'm then understood or seen, like you said.

Rachael Cerrotti: So you're working on this project and it's being supported by National Geographic and it's set to come out in the magazine April of 2020. 

Pete Muller: Yeah. We'd done all the layout of all that stuff, and it was to be in the special issue of National Geographic magazine commemorating 50 Years of Earth Day, which was April 2020. And that means the way the magazine publishes it comes out actually in March for the preceding month. So it was like just as Covid, the severity and the disruption of Covid were becoming so apparent to us all. That's when this story came out.

Rachael Cerrotti: So as you're working through that and you're trying to figure out, okay, how am I going to get this work that I've done and these people have gifted me their stories and trusted me with their emotional experiences and I want to do justice to getting them out in the world, you then start to turn your attention to Covid and you end up working on a documentary film called The First Wave that documents those first few months in New York City. And that film came out recently. Share with me some of the difference of experiences of working on those two projects back to back. 

Pete Muller: I actually thought quite a lot when Covid really got started and we were all locked down. That there was something that felt very much like solastalgia. In a way, there's an argument, it's maybe a little bit of a stretch, but there's an argument to be made that Covid was a form of environmental transformation. It transformed these environments, not in a physical sense, right? All the architecture of all of our cities, the places around us urban, rural, whatever, the architecture, the topography didn't change. But what vanished was all of the social connection that occurs on these stages. And I think the biggest takeaway for me from the solastalgia project is that people can endure a tremendous amount of physical change. The town can burn, the island can slip into the ocean and people can live with and or around that. But when the social tapestry ruptures as a result, that's where the real pain is. They can get their heads around so much of the physicality. But when the physicality starts to have real, meaningful breakdowns in their sense of social connection with their community, that is where the deepest pain is. Covid was like - it was a sort of an express lane to the worst parts of solastalgia. You could look out your window and the place was still the same for all intents and purposes. But all of the things that we derived so much meaning and energy and all that stuff of our interplay, our connections with all these people, it was just immediately vanished. And I called people in Paradise, California and other places where I'd worked. And I said, you know, how are you guys doing? We've just been doing all that work together and I like to stay in touch with people that I work with. And I said, how are you feeling out there? And  their reaction was, we're pretty used to this. We're pretty used to this like the town burned. Everybody that we knew, all of our social life, all the restaurants we would go to and the places where we'd go to play music and hang out in the lodge hall and the VFW and all that stuff. And also it all burned. Our structure was already broken by a different form of environmental transformation. So we are sort of relatively well prepared.

Rachael Cerrotti: I always really appreciate our conversations. It's just always a pleasure.

Pete Muller: Always. Thank you.

Glenn Albricht (recorded by Pete): The voices of global climate change about its distress is a story that has as many languages and as context as we could to bring into the fold. What it's trying to define is the loss of a sense of place. That is a really simple concept. Why don't we have in English, a single word that corresponds to a human feeling or emotion that is profound, obvious, it's felt worldwide in varying contexts and probably has been felt historically for thousands of years when people are in similar circumstances. Why don't we have a common language to talk about this distress? The solastalgic moment has been with us forever as humans. But the age of solastalgia is now upon us. It's the age of chronic change agents that are negatively affecting our amenity, our quality of life, the place attachments that we have. Our sense of place. And so I think we now need novel ways of explaining what's going on and how we are responding to it. 

OUTRO

Rachael Cerrotti: That was the voice of Glenn Albrecht who coined the term solastalgia. The testimony you heard in this episode was recorded by Pete for his National Geographic Project. 

Thank you to Pete for joining me today. You can learn more about his work with Solastalgia on our website. We will also include a trailer to his recent film The First Wave which documents the first months of Covid in New York City. 

The Memory Generation was created in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation which is home to more than 55,000 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide. You can learn more about their work and the Visual History Archive at sfi.usc.edu.

You can find additional links, book lists, testimony clips and all types of other resources and stories on our website: memorygenerationpodcast.com. Our editor is Lene Bech Sillesen. Our executive producer and co-creator of this show is Stephen Smith. The music is from Kodomo.

And I’m Rachael Cerrotti. We are halfway through our first season of The Memory Generation and will be taking the next month off from releasing new episodes. Both myself and our editor Lene will be in Denmark for some reporting work. We will return in September with the remaining 9 episodes of this season. Until then, get caught up on our past 9 episodes and go take a listen to my first podcast called We Share The Same Sky. 

Thanks for being with us.