Trauma Stewardship

by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky

  “My question is: Are we making an impact?”

  Kirsten Stade, an environmental scientist who also takes in foster dogs and cats, told me about her struggles with feelings of helplessness. “With the environmental work, I often succumb to a feeling of impotence, that any issue I work on, any awareness I raise, is just such an insignificant drop in the massive bucket of impending crisis. The work I do with animals brings its own unique challenges. On the one hand, this work is enormously rewarding because every act of animal rescue has an immediate, tangible result: One life has been saved. The struggle comes from the knowledge, again, that whatever I do is pitiably inadequate to the task. So though every act of rescuing brings the knowledge of a life saved, it also brings the knowledge of countless lives not saved. This to me feels like personal failure.”

  A Ph.D3. candidate in ecology described another aspect of feeling hopeless and helpless. She began her work in the Peruvian Amazon in 1996, as a 21-year-old undergraduate, and continued it through graduate school. She said,

  I grew up in northern Michigan and spent most of my free time playing in the woods and lakes but, also, as the daughter of journalists, was immersed in world news. I was incredibly idealistic and wanted to help make a difference. In Peru, the elders asked me to study and document community-based fisheries management. The national government views the community’s efforts as illegal, while the people view local management as both a right and an immediate necessity to ensure that the resources upon which they depend continue into the future. They hoped that documenting some of the practices might help change national policy.

  It was incredibly fulfilling work, but also very lonely and harrowing at times. Despite community efforts, the fishery had clearly begun to collapse, and in 1999 high floods led to actual starvation.

  When I came home, I was severely depressed and diagnosed with vicarious traumatization. I told people that I felt like I had been banging my head against a brick wall and the only dents that had been made were in my now very bloody skull. The hardest thing for me, in general, is that I feel overwhelmed by the level of need, the lack of empowerment, and the fact that nothing I do seems to make a difference. I often end up wondering why I didn’t study to be a doctor. I know that to some extent I am coping by not letting myself fully look things in the face at the moment, and I want to find a better path.

  In the course of extensive research, Judy Garber and Martin E. P. Seligman identified three types of perceptions that contribute directly to feelings of helplessness among people in traumatic circumstances. First, individuals hold themselves personally responsible for a troubled situation even when no one could reasonably be expected to master it. Many workers can relate to this feeling: You know in your gut that there is only so much you can do, but you still feel responsible in some way. Second, individuals perceive that the traumatic event itself will be long-lived—they see no possibility of relief. This applies particularly to workers who view their work as their career and not a time-limited job. Unyielding focus on a single field may leave workers feeling in over their heads and unable to see even a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Third, individuals believe that they are likely to repeat their current struggles in another time and place. Workers who feel they are not functioning well in a specific trauma-related situation may imagine that they will experience the same difficulties in all similar situations. A person with such an attitude is likely to experience a greater sense of helplessness than someone who understands each situation to be a specific instance and not an indicator of future coping capacity.

  A conversation I heard between two women who are friends and colleagues in post-Katrina New Orleans illustrates how overwhelming these feelings can be:

  “I want to go home, but I don’t have a home to go home to—my daughters aren’t there, my neighbors aren’t there, my doctor’s not there.”

  “I know it’s hard, but everything passes in time. You know, in 10 years this won’t seem so bad. I know that seems like a long time, but ...”

  “Yeah, that does feel like a long time. Right now, one day feels like a long time.”

  PROFILEVANCE VREDENBURG

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  CURRENTLY: Assistant professor in the Department of Biology at San Francisco State University; cofounder and assistant director of AmphibiaWeb, an amphibian bioinformatics and conservation organization; research associate at the University of California, Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and at the California Academy of Sciences.

  FORMERLY: Postdoctoral scholar, Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley.

  Iam an ecologist. My area of study is amphibian ecology, conservation, and evolution. I actually got started working in marine science, mostly fishes but also crustaceans, and I was once even hired as an algae specialist. My work over the past 20 years has taken me from Alaska to Antarctica, from the Caribbean to Guatemala and Mexico, and even as far as Asia. Although my passion now is studying amphibians, I began investigating them as an ecologist. I wasn’t one of those kids who were chasing frogs from age four.

  As an undergrad and for five years after, I studied sexual selection in marine fishes. When it came to graduate school, I looked for a project with more of a conservation angle. I wanted my scientific work to feed back directly to preserve this beautiful world we live in. I was lucky to find a project in the Sierra Nevada—in California. It’s an amazing place to work. These natural parks and wilderness areas are some of our planet’s most protected habitats, but it turns out that amphibians—frogs, toads, salamanders—have been disappearing even here. In the Sierra Nevada, we’re talking about frogs who live in areas with no roads for hundreds of miles and who move maybe only a few hundred meters in their entire lives. So why are we losing them?

  I came in as a conservation biologist at the time knowing little about amphibians. But when I began to study mountain yellow-legged frogs [a species listed as critically endangered], I tested an idea that others had totally brushed aside. I wanted to further explore this idea that the introduction of species was causing the decline of these frogs. People introduced trout into areas that historically had no fish, and the trout ate the frogs, but no one was there to watch it happen. I basically did classic ecological experiments to show that the introduction of nonnative trout has decimated frog populations in these supposedly pristine areas. The truth is that even our most protected areas have been greatly changed, sometimes in subtle ways, by humans. My research was really exciting, because in this time of worldwide amphibian decline there are next to no examples of frogs recovering after declines. In this case, I found that if you restored the habitat to its natural condition, the frogs rebounded and quickly, so imagine this ray of hope! It was just incredible.

  The Park Service and other federal and state agencies quickly realized that this was a simple and elegant way to turn around these amphibian declines. They took my Ph.D. thesis and turned it into actual conservation action. Think about how meaningful this could be for these frogs—a graduate student’s efforts scaled up to the level of federal and state agencies with many more resources to bring to the situation. Exactly what I was hoping to do with my life! And then just as the frogs were starting to recover, just as the conservation actions were implemented on a much larger landscape and things were turning around—just then I started finding first dozens and then tens of thousands of dead frogs. You can imagine what the effect was on me personally. After seven years of monitoring populations, conducting experiments, publishing papers, and proving to people that something could be done to help these amphibians, my colleagues and I started finding dead frogs. It turned out it was an emerging disease.

  The impact was devastating. We had put in all that hard work. I could see a future where these amphibians could be restored to their original state and saved from extinction. Having the whole ecosystem revert to a more natural state was good not only for the frogs but for all the spe
cies in the food web. The interconnected web of life was suddenly moving back in the right direction—the algae, the plants, the frogs, the coyotes, the raven, the bears. And now all that was unraveling.

  I was overtaken by a sense of doom that there really is nothing we can do to reverse this worldwide decline of species. I’d heard about this disease affecting amphibians in other places. I had thought, “It’s not gonna happen here,” but it did. It just destroyed me. There was this beautiful alpine lake that was home to populations I’d sat with for years while they were being restored. I remember sitting on the shoreline just crying my heart out amidst hundreds of dead frogs. I had gone from this positive position of feeling that we had the power to turn things around to realizing that I was absolutely powerless. I had been working on this single project for nine years, and suddenly entire populations went extinct in a matter of months. Looking out over that quiet landscape, I thought, “There may be a time not far away when they are all extinct, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” I felt like I wanted to jump off a cliff or something, because the spirit had just dropped out of me. I had an emotional connection to these really beautiful animals that I personally had helped by giving their habitat back. I had seen this vibrant life return to this area and now I was seeing it all disappear and I couldn’t do anything. I can’t really describe the feeling—it was like floating back down to earth. I went from, wow, humans can do these great things and people are lining up to help to . . . nada, worthless. That was really, really, really hard.

  So what in the world is going on with this disease? I finally picked myself up and found a bunch of smart people to write a proposal with, and we got funded by the National Science Foundation to go and find out why this is causing such massive mortality. It’s the worst case in recorded history of a disease driving species to extinction. And it jumps between species of amphibians. Some might ask, “Who cares?” Well, I care because I care about amphibians, but everyone should care. Think about it: If this type of deadly disease got into a human population or into the organisms that we depend on for our survival (corn, rice, wheat, cattle, poultry), it would be catastrophic. There is very good reason to keenly understand a disease like this. Why is it killing amphibians, how is it spreading, is there a way to slow down the effects? There are a lot of big questions that are very interesting purely for science but also for conservation and for our general understanding of emerging diseases. Hundreds of species of amphibians have gone extinct because of this disease. The one hopeful thing we’ve found is that some species are surviving, so we’re looking at the coexistence between the deadly fungus and those species. We still don’t have any solid answers, but we do know more than we did four or five years ago.

  I have traveled to Mexico and Guatemala and am working with colleagues in Sri Lanka, Madagascar, the Philippines, Thailand, Laos, and China to see if it’s killing species and where. Back in the Sierra Nevada I’m trying out techniques to slow down the effects of the disease and to help the frogs survive the epidemic. Two years ago I got permission from the National Park Service to go treat some frogs in an epidemic using an antifungal bath. So far, it looks like it worked. I’m trying to convince the Park Service to try this on a bigger scale with more populations that lie in the path of this disease. Several researchers are also working with zoos to try to get in front of these waves of mortality and save some of these species before they go extinct. We are bringing a few individuals into captivity to keep them safe. We’re trying to get them to breed so that some day we can reintroduce them to the wild, but this is uncharted territory and no one knows if it will be successful. This is unbelievable, how much destruction this disease has caused. It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

  I’m linking up with researchers all around the world to look at this problem. When calamities happen, folks all over the planet come together. That’s what’s going on in the scientific community. It’s such a dramatic and dangerous thing that rivalries have gone away and people are coming together and sharing information and trying to figure out what we can do.

  I just coauthored a paper with David Wake that has gotten a lot of press because it concludes that the amphibians are signaling that we are entering the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth. In the history of life on Earth there have been five mass extinctions, or periods of time where life on Earth nearly went extinct. The most drastic one, the Permian-Triassic Extinction, occurred 250 million years ago, and 95 percent of life on Earth went extinct. By the way, amphibians survived that one! We think that right now we’re entering another phase of mass extinction, and the amphibians are the sentinels. They are telling us that something is wrong. More than a third of the world’s 6,300 amphibian species are threatened with extinction. It’s disheartening, to say the least. Good god, what’s going to happen? We have one earth, and there’s nowhere else to live. People tend to forget that. It’s difficult to look at bad news, but you can’t put this aside. In my job I’m confronted with it on a daily basis. I’m studying this group of organisms that has been around for 300 million years, and right now as I’m watching them, in my short life, they’re going extinct.

  Sometimes I’d like to go work on something happy, like a children’s film for Pixar, but instead I work on gloom and doom. I got into this because I love nature and I care about our world. I feel absolutely privileged to be in these beautiful places with these gorgeous animals, but watching them struggle and die in my hands is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve always had this idea that if I ever had children, I’d take them up and show them these amazing frogs. Now what am I going to do? Is there going to be any place left or are they just going to see it on a computer screen? And that is a horrible thought. I see so much beauty in life, but when I see species disappearing, I wonder what is going to be left. I don’t want to be Mr. Grim, but that’s what I’m confronted with. Sometimes I just get really sad. Science is about facts, and there’s no avoiding the truth.

  The conservation side of our field has grown by leaps and bounds, and we are all trying to study different angles of this problem. People have come together and collaborated in a way no one did in the past. There’s also this impending doom. The older generation of scientists talk about places all over the world that used to be full of amphibians, and they talk about all the wonderful night hikes they’d go on and you go there now and there’s nothing there. At many sites, over 40 percent of the species are gone forever. In Costa Rica, at the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, there used to be over 20 species of amphibians. Today you are lucky if you see one. I feel robbed on some level. If something is extinct, there’s nothing you can do about it. There are plenty of stories from older scientists that talk about what they’d seen and how abundant this salamander or that frog was, and you go out at night these days and it’s completely silent because there’s not a single amphibian calling.

  Scientists aren’t supposed to feel very much. We like talking about data and facts and hypotheses. We don’t usually talk about feelings, especially not when we’re in a crowd, but with this topic you hear the sadness and despair come through. It creeps out during scientific talks. There’s a silence in the room and you can feel it. Before this doom and gloom came, people at meetings would get together and talk about new findings. Now there’s a lot of talk about what has been lost and what is going to be hit next and what can be done. The tone has changed from excitement and discovery to bewilderment and sadness.

  It’s really hard to be enthusiastic about getting other people to study amphibians when I know that eventually they’ll hit this sad truth. I hope I don’t lose it so badly that I don’t want to encourage people to get excited about science and research and nature, but it’s pretty hard. When grad students ask to work in my lab, I think, “Are they going to be able to deal with the animals dying?” I never thought about that before. I used to feel much more hope that we could turn things around. Now, with things happening at the worldwide level, I think some of the problems are
insurmountable. That’s a big, big change for me. I try to stay positive and focused on the few cases where we might make a difference. I think we’re poised to turn things around in the U.S., at least culturally. We can use education to teach people to keep biodiversity in mind. That is very important to us changing things.

  I don’t know that there’s a good way to find peace with this. Realizing that bad things happen is an understanding that is part of life, but I always thought that bad things could be turned around. With extinction there’s nothing left to fix. There may be a fundamental lesson about hopelessness, but I had never let it sink in.

  I try to tell myself that even though I haven’t seen it, there must be something we can do. Maybe there’s a way we won’t lose everything. I tell myself, let me quickly learn what I can right now. The whole scientific community feels this way. It’s such a crisis that the scientific community is willing to do things now that we wouldn’t have been willing to do 10 years ago. We’re now trying riskier things. Science is becoming more flexible. A few years ago, we thought if we couldn’t get a research paper out of it, we were wasting our time. Now we’re like,“Screw it, we’ll do it anyway.”We need the agencies that fund science to allow more flexibility.

  I feel a sense of pressure that goes well beyond having to turn in my next report, to get a manuscript published, or to get this research done. The pressure is phenomenal. I had no idea how much pressure there is. I feel like I need 10 copies of myself to keep up, and it’s not even close to being enough. Extinction is really forever. I can’t stress how much weight that puts on my life. Sometimes I wake up at three in the morning thinking about all I need to do to move this research forward. It’s not for my career—that doesn’t even matter. It’s that feeling of despair and sense that we’ve got to do something! This is the last breath of air and you’ve got to do everything you can, or you’re not going to make it back up to the surface. It’s like this not just for me, but for everyone in my field. And you don’t want to live life that way all the time.