Mourning the World We Evolved For, Still Living Here

I feel homesick for an Earth I never knew—rivers that ran clear, skies dark enough to reveal the Milky Way, seasons that arrived predictably, forests that covered continents. We’re grieving for a planet that existed before we could damage it, mourning a home we destroyed in the process of building our civilization.

The Earth we evolved on no longer exists. The climate our bodies expect, the landscapes our genes remember, the sounds and smells and rhythms that shaped human consciousness for millions of years—they’re artifacts now, preserved only in protected fragments that feel like museums of our own past.

We’re homesick for stability—for weather patterns our ancestors could read, for abundant wildlife, for soil that stayed fertile without chemical intervention. Our bodies carry cellular memories of a world where the air cleaned itself, where water was universally safe to drink, where every ecosystem was fully functional.

This isn’t nostalgia for a simpler time. It’s biological grief for environmental conditions we’re adapted to expect but can no longer find. We evolved in intimate relationship with intact natural systems, and their absence registers in our nervous systems as a form of homesickness that can’t be cured by returning somewhere, because that somewhere no longer exists.

The planet we call home is now a planet in transition, changing faster than adaptation allows, becoming something unprecedented in human experience. We’re homesick because we’re still here, but home isn’t.

Every child born now will experience this as normal, but those of us old enough to remember before will carry this homesickness for a world that existed but can’t be recovered—the particular sadness of being the last generation to remember what we lost.