The Cost of Bearing Witness to the Environmental Crisis: Vicarious Traumatization and Dealing with Secondary Traumatic Stress among Environmental Researchers

ABSTRACT

Researchers working on environmental issues are often unprepared to deal with the traumatic potential of their studies. They often face traumatic encounters in their first-hand experiences in fieldwork, for example, by finding animals killed by poachers or seeing the disastrous effects of climate change. However, environmental researchers also suffer from forms of secondary trauma or vicarious trauma related to environmental problems when they become affected by hearing or reading about the suffering of others. Unfortunately, however, very little support structures exist for students and researchers who experience secondary trauma. This article discusses the phenomenon of secondary trauma among researchers and students of environmental science. Through an analysis of existing empirical studies, the article highlights that there are clear signs of traumatic symptoms among environmental researchers. The most common reactions include psychic numbing, compassion fatigue, and burnouts. The article also makes suggestions for recognizing vulnerabilities, and for enhancing resilience through self-care. Since traumatic exposure by environmental researchers has not been systematically studied or discussed in detail in the existing literature, this article makes a significant contribution to the field showcasing ideas for further research, including possible empirical studies on the ways in which trauma and secondary trauma feature among environmental researchers.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecological trauma
• researcher
• emotion
• climate change

Acknowledgments

I thank the editors and the anonymous peer reviewer for their insightful comments about my manuscript. Their diligence helped to improve this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I am full aware of the vast academic discussion of the problems included in defining exactly what ‘environment’ (or ‘nature’) mean. My strong view is that enough clarity can be maintained without extensive discussions about the exact meaning of these words (which is contextual). For the purposes of this article, ‘environmental’ refers mainly to events and threats related to environmental problems: damage of threat of damage to ecosystems and their inhabitants. ‘Ecological’, strictly speaking, is more related to the complexity and inter-relationality studied by ecology, but also this term is often used to refer to environmental problems.

2. For example, the closest discussion to environmental problems that Collins and Collins (2005) includes is about treating traumas generated by ‘losing a pet’ (332). It would be interesting and potentially influential to integrate the discussions in these kind of works – such as the discussion about ‘an ecological understanding of resilience in trauma survivors’ (Harvey and Tummala-Narra 2007) – into the less anthropocentric theories about ecological trauma that I discuss in my article, but this falls mainly out of the scope of this article.

3. In their study about psychosocial dimensions of environmental concern, Hoggett and Randall (2018) interviewed both environmental activists and researchers. They observed that many activists, in the UK, had severe experiences of stress and burnout, and based on this experience they had developed communal ways to deal with psychological pressure. The climate scientists, however, suffered from lack of institutional or communal support for their emotional burdens. Hoggett and Randall approached this problem from the point of view of a theory of social defences. They argue (235): ”Scientific culture … creates social defences that seem to have made any working-through of anxieties unnecessary, a source of ambivalence, or a source of continual difficulty and pain. The scientists described several characteristics of science and its practice that we thought protected people against anxiety, but they also described points where these social defences were breached. The characteristics we identified as performing these defensive functions were ideas of scientific progress, scientific detachment, rationality and specialisation, scientific excitement and the normalisation of overwork.” I received information about their research only at a stage when my article was nearly finished. This is the reason why I have not extensively engaged in discussing with Hoggett and Randall’s research, although I refer to the many similar results that they share with the other studies I use in my article.

4. See Willis (2012), for an example how feelings related to climate trauma drove one researcher into climate research: ‘I was motivated to pursue a dissertation related to climate change because I was anxious about the future and about the alterations I already perceived in local ecologies. I was frustrated by the lack of action being taken and grief-stricken at the predicted loss of life. The scale of the problem and the potential for destruction engendered feelings that at times threatened to overwhelm me.’

5. ‘When I was five, a pond and thicket area down the street from my house was filled in and leveled while I was away. I remember coming home and finding my beloved ecosystem denuded of all greenery, and completely empty of the beavers and their dam, the minnows, the birds, and the countless rabbits and squirrels that had been a comforting and valued presence. I was devastated. Consumed and overcome by grief and loss. I did not want to eat, or play, or go to school. I felt as though I had lost something deeply important, and intimately a part of the fabric of my life’ (Cunsolo Willox 2012, 137). These symptoms are clearly connected to trauma, even when various frameworks can be applied to analyze them. Cunsolo herself uses grief theory in this context.

6. In the winter 2019, the several petitions by environmental researchers for climate action, and for support to the children who have practiced climate action -oriented school strikes in the vein of Greta Thunberg, seem to have functioned both as means for practicing social responsibility and as a means for psychological (adaptive) coping.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Panu Pihkala

Dr. Panu Pihkala is a postdoctoral researcher who has specialized in the psychosocial and spiritual dimensions of environmental problems. Pihkala has written extensively on ‘eco-anxiety’, environmental education, and spirituality. He is a leading Finnish expert in the psychosocial dimensions of climate change and serves as an expert in many projects. He was awarded the national prize for adult education (Sivistyspalkinto) in 2018 for his work on eco-anxiety and hope.