Psychological Toll of Being a Sustainability Scientist

Like many academics, I’m more or less convinced that I am somewhere on the mild end of the autism spectrum. No, I haven’t been diagnosed and I doubt very much that my slight ‘autistic’ tendencies have altered my social capacity, despite my wife claiming that I have only two emotions – angry or happy. Nor have they engendered any sort of idiot savant mathematical capability.

But I’m reasonably comfortable with mathematics, I can do a single task for hours once it consumes my attention, and I’m excited about discovering how things work. And I love to code. Rather than academics having a higher innate likelihood of being ‘autistic’, I just think the job attracts such personalities.

In the past few years though, my psychological state is probably less dictated by the hard-wiring of my ‘autidemic’ mind and more and more influenced by the constant battery of negative information my brain receives.

Let’s face it, the study of ecology, conservation and sustainability can be very depressing. Try as I might to provide some positive angle to a particular topic I am presenting in a public seminar, I invariably leave the audience slightly depressed. Yes, there are some good-news stories in conservation ecology, but they are few and far between, and are wholly overshadowed by the massive loss of biodiversity we are witnessing right now. For every half step we stumble forward, we take 10 giant steps backward.

Whether it’s spiralling climate change, bad government, extinctions, toxicity, poverty, human over-population, deforestation, corporatochracy, or the notion that most people couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about the plight of our planet, we get inundated with bad news daily. It’s a wonder that any of us get out of bed in the morning – even if we only keep doing it for the ones we love.

I’m not about to stop fighting for my environment, but I have been wondering lately just how much this never-ceasing flood of negativity affects my psychological state. I’m not depressed, but I wonder if I am experiencing even a modicum of what people in the military or emergency services experience after dealing with constant death, disease, injury and destruction. For I, like many of my conservation ecologist colleagues, deal with death, disease, injury and destruction of the planet and its species every day.

It would be academically interesting (there go my autistic tendencies again) if psychologists examined the effects of such negativity on our outlook, capacities and even our personal relationships. A quick Google Scholar search suggests that the psychology of conservationists is a non-existent field of research. Perhaps it should be.

CJA Bradshaw