The MPI also accused state and federal governments of being in the coal industry’s back pocket in green-lighting coal projects that negatively impact communities and the environment.

The institute also said that it was an indictment on state and federal governments that “no co-ordinated regulatory framework exists for dealing with legacy mine land”

This was also the case regarding what it sees as the “lack of acknowledgement given to the non-material and non-economic costs to individuals and communities from land left to sour after the mining industry has up-stumps and moved on”

“Research investigating the lived experiences of residents living near existing and encroaching open-pit mines tells a story of emotional and psychological displacement, dislocation and disenfranchisement, with attendant negative consequences for their sense of identity, belonging, control and good health,” the MPI said last week.

The institute referred to a phenomenon it calls “solastagia”, a term created by Australian “environmental philosopher” Dr Glenn Albrecht to describe a “formally recognised and overlooked form of place-based distress”

“While ‘nostalgia’ and ‘homesickness’ are concepts used to describe the distress people may feel when separated from a loved place, ‘solastalgia’ refers to the pain and dis-ease felt by people living in a home environment perceived to be subject to negative environmental change,” the MPI says.

Albrecht himself describes solastalgia as “a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home”

Albrecht found that, for some, solastalgia manifested as anxiety, insomnia, psychosomatic illness and feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness; while in others, “the pain of watching a loved landscape desolated by large scale mining activities motivated them to avoid the affected landscape altogether”.

Albrecht cited one indigenous man who told researchers in a 2007 study into the psychological impacts of large scale coal mining, that “it is very depressing, it brings you down”

“Even [indigenous] people that don’t have the traditional ties to the area … it still brings them down. It is pathetic just to drive along, they cannot stand that drive. We take different routes to travel down south just so we don’t have to see all the holes, all the dirt … because it makes you wild,” the man reportedly said.

MPI says solastalgia is finding application in a growing number of contexts where “people’s endemic sense of place in coming under threat by globalised drivers of environmental degradation like anthropogenic climate change, globalised flows of capital and modes of economic production”.

“However, it is perhaps not surprising to learn that solastalgia was created in response to the place-based distress felt by residents contending with large-scale open pit coal mining in in the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales,” the MPI said.