Unevenly distributed solastalgia in Ferlo, Senegal: differences between personal experiences of sudden change and the collective narrative of loss of a familiar environment

International audience This paper addresses two issues: exploring the impact of people's experiences of environmental change on their perception of it, and understanding how these changes affect people's relationships with their environment, given that more and more people will be affected by them in the future. We examine this concept through the lens of solastalgia — the nostalgia for a familiar environment degraded by environmental changes — in the Ferlo, a silvopastoral area in the Sahelian desert of Senegal that is predominantly inhabited by Fulani pastoralists and has undergone significant environmental changes since the beginning of the 20th century. We conducted 40 semi-structured interviews with 22 women and 18 men aged between 19 and 96, as well as administering 300 questionnaires to a representative sample of Ferlo inhabitants. The results show that many of the respondents expressed solastalgia, having observed many changes that affected their way of life. While the widespread expression of regret among the respondents suggests the presence of a collective narrative that values this past way of life and the environmental conditions that were part of it, some of the older respondents expressed less solastalgia due to the severity of the conditions they experienced in the past — especially during a major drought in the 1970s. Quantitative analyses also demonstrate the influence of place attachment and environmental identity on the expression of solastalgia. This article considers both long-term and abrupt environmental changes that might result in unevenly distributed solastalgia, offering new perspectives on the study of this phenomenon.