Dear Friends, Family, Fellow Authors, Future Historians, and Cherished Readers,
It is with a great deal of pleasure that I write to you today, on Monday, September 22nd, 2025, the official publication date of When Home Hurts: A Nonfiction Anthology. It is entirely about the concept of solastalgia. You may be wondering what this term means: it indicates a homesickness or longing that one feels when they are still at home and in a certain place, knowing that it is at risk of being forever changed by ecological calamities such as hurricane, coastal flooding, beach erosion, rising sea levels, shrinking ice caps, forest fires, earthquakes, droughts, extreme heat, mudslides, and all the various types of disaster that strike because of anthropogenic climate change.
“The Memory of Calmer Seas” is very much a meditation on the destruction and chaos wrought by 2012 Hurricane Sandy and the fear that has gripped this peninsula ever since.
Please consider purchasing a copy of When Home Hurts for your bookshelf today; it contains my essay and many others worthy of reading and rereading.
There are some things too precious to enumerate, too valuable to put a price on. I firmly believe that the ideal of saving the Earth, from its biosphere and preserving a precariously declining array of biodiversity for generations to come, to its atmosphere, so that we do not leave our children to inherit a world that is not warming beyond repair, to its hydrosphere, and what should be the fundamental human right to clean drinking water. These things are too precious to sacrifice in the name of industry. In the name of profit. In the name of conquest.
“These precious things; we’ll watch them burn – or else we will bear witness as they are drowned in a sea of sorrow so vast it cannot be contained by mortal means.”
If a tree grows in a forest and nobody cares when it is felled for timber, our collective silence will speak for itself. But who will speak for them? Who will speak for the non-human other? Who will speak for the unborn child? Who will speak for the whales? Who will speak for the great apes? Who will confront those who participate in the ivory trade for love of elephants? Who is going to stand up for what is right, and who will remain stubbornly silent? Who will act and who will sit there mutely because they don’t have the capacity to care? Who among us will do more than just acknowledge there is a problem; who will speak for Earth?
I don’t want our leaders to speak for us. I wouldn’t want our governments to speak for this world. I want billionaires to account (and provide financial compensation) for their crimes against humanity, yes, but in the final account, I do not wish for them to speak – not even for themselves – because they’ve had too much airtime already. I want to hear from the youth. I want the voices from the slums, from the ghettos. I want a child who will have to spend their entire life tethered to this one, tiny world we are quickly bespoiling – to act as an arbiter.
Because there is no Planet B. We only have one world, and it is the only one in the observable universe confirmed to harbor life. Her name is Earth, and she is crying out for help in every way possible. Who will listen? Who will fight to protect the happiness of their great-great-great grandchildren? Who will advocate for a greener future?
My generation can ill afford to be silent on the matter. We must act. We will be taught in future history books either way. If we hold our tongue, we prove ourselves complicit in the human-engineered warming and pollution of this world. Human ingenuity has limits to how far it can reverse the damage it has wrought upon itself. There is no magical device or technology that will save us all from the sins of our ancestors, or if there is – it has yet to be invented. We must decide if we want to be spoken about as just another generation who let the world fall into further ruin – or as one of the first to say, “No more.”
We will speak for Earth, because someone must.
I speak for Earth, and I speak because of the silence of others. Silence in the face of inequity on any scale – from global to the individual – becomes a form of complacency. It’ll render you complicit. The world is watching, and all they will see is a generation that didn’t care about their descendants enough to stand up.
The only way you shall be remembered – is for your cowardice.
May the strength to speak find you in unexpected places,
Caitlin Cacciatore
