From the Librarian: The Vicarious Trauma of Living
I was asked to write a piece for the student magazine at Flinders University recently, and although the abridged version is on its way to publication, I’ve been encouraged to post the full article here. I know it’s a little late to be talking about the bushfires since the national focus has shifted on to our next crisis, but beyond the prompt of “bushfire recovery: where do we go from here”, I found myself exploring deeper themes of what it means to have existed through the first two months of 2020. This is a long one, and a hard one, but it’s important.
Liz Waldron, Living Librarian
Bushfire recovery
Where do we go from here?
I don’t read about the bushfires any more. Vicarious trauma (or compassion fatigue, whichever you prefer) is a complicated beast, waxing and waning like the moon. There is a constant background of new information relating to this monstrosity scouring the land, yet my ability to process this information ebbs and flows. Like the tides.
In spy apocrypha, there is a trap where a string that suspends the lives of the protagonists is being slowly unravelled or burned by the heat of a candle. Vicarious trauma describes a similar mechanism; people who empathically engage with trauma survivors, or traumatic material, move the candle closer every time they engage. Continued engagement with other people’s trauma can slowly unravel the string that suspends you, that keeps you separate from becoming traumatised yourself (1). This is usually used in reference to people with a degree of professional exposure to trauma; mental health workers, law enforcement, emergency services, even social support services (2) (3). Yet with incessant media updates that draw you in, urge you to help, please help the burning and broken communities, anybody who cares enough to try to stay updated is at risk of developing compassion fatigue. Everything is happening so much all the time, how can one person choose one thing to do that will make everything better?
The effects of the bushfires have been so broad as to stretch into factors we were not prepared to address. Hotter, drier, and windier climates contribute to the frequency and intensity of the fires. Australia has been averaging 1 degree Celsius hotter per year since 1910. The difference in temperatures of the east and west Indian Ocean is at its largest in 60 years, causing the Eastern half (that’s us) to receive less rain, contributing to drought conditions (4). As the fires get bigger, they can “create their own weather”, generating lighting storms that increase the risk of further fires (5).
Reports on the bushfires emphasise that their scope is unprecedented; but that does not mean unanticipated. In the 1970’s, the CSIRO already had researchers across multiple disciplines explicitly raising the risks of climate change (6), with the first paper linking climate change to worsening bushfires emerging in the 1980’s (7). Prime Minister Bob Hawke first spoke of reducing climate emissions in the 1990’s, aiming for a 20% cut in emissions by 2005 (8). The National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, founded in 2008 (9), was our only dedicated climate change adaptation program - and had its budget reduced to less than 20% of its original value in 2014, finally losing its federal funding in June 2018 (10). In 2014, the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology warned that extreme fire weather have increased since the 1970s, and that a further increase in the duration of fire season, extreme fire-weather days, and drought frequency and severity were to be expected (11) (12). We knew this was coming (13).
Yet here we all are, asking, “how do we fix this?” We were bafflingly unprepared for an event that we were warned about decades ago (14). Although the best cure would have been prevention, we are now a nation in crisis management mode; we need to pick up the pieces now, and work towards getting ready for our next environmental crisis.
Ecological Recovery
The bushfires may be a symptom of the damage we have done to our environment, but the environmental damage that a fire disaster wreaks is particularly fierce. Our immediate environmental needs are focussed on salvage and recovery, where possible; efforts to support environmental recovery have ranged from blanket drives for injured wildlife to desperate calls for native seeds. Some areas are still considered too dangerous to send volunteers to without crisis training, but Conservation Volunteers has been tasked with coordinating environmental recovery volunteer efforts, so their site should be your first port of call for immediate environmental action (15).
However, most recovery will depend upon slow, bureaucratic processes. Breeding programs and increasing protections for native wildlife are a good first step, but equally as important is the need to prevent the over-growth of non-native plants and stop the further destruction of native plants. Our native environment was already under a constant state of threat due to predatory introduced species (16), and with populations severely damaged by the fires, we can’t afford to be reckless with land clearing, even for economic or infrastructure purposes (17). It is not enough to plant two trees for every one uprooted, and it is certainly not enough to pretend that mining companies will make efforts to minimise their impact on the environment (18) (19) (20) (21); we need national economic development models which are evidence-based, future-focussed, and environmentally friendly.
There has also been significant debate about what preventive methods should be put in place to protect our environment in the future. Our first step should be to make dramatic changes in our cultural understanding of climate change; the research into ways to address disasters such as this are constantly being progressively de-funded and buried. As people actively pursuing tertiary education, we should all already share the belief that there are genuine experts in the world, in many different fields of study, who spend their lives discovering new things and changing their minds in discussion with other experts. Our next step is to file down the cultural calluses that have grown over the years in resistance to expert opinions. People have stopped listening to experts, have begun to deride research as somehow being outside of the realms of reality. We need to start fighting to wrest back respect for expertise before our degrees become meaningless, before we are stuck with the terrifying knowledge that we are drowning because we let people louder than us poke holes in our lifeboat. To that end, we need to prepare in our studies to do more cross-disciplinary work: not just in academia, but outside of it. We need to practice being more relatable and less intimidating; we need to learn how to make people listen to us when they think they shouldn’t have to.
There is currently a great debate about whether methods of fire control traditionally used by Indigenous communities would have been an effective preventive measure (22). This hypothetical would have been near impossible to test due to restrictions on what Indigenous communities are allowed to do with their land. Despite validation as a possibility by some fire experts (23), it is unreasonable to expect cultural land management from communities who are not paid to do so, are legally restricted from doing so, and lack the resources to engage across the entirety of vulnerable regions (24). Just as volunteer firefighters should be paid a living wage over the duration of their extended period of crisis management, so too should fire prevention consultation and action be seen as an urgent and valuable (and therefore paid) initiative.
Community Recovery
For years now, the political approach to urban crowding has been to argue that people should move out of the city to rural areas where the rent is cheaper (25). Yet where can we go now that the infrastructure in those areas is destroyed, and the people have left? As more and more areas are being labelled “high risk” (26), do we expect people to move back there when they have no fire-resistant house to protect them, and no funds to build one (27)? If they do move back, they must face the questions of how to live an adequate life - not healthy, merely acceptable. Where do we live, where do we work, how do we build a healthy life without a community to interact with? What do I do to support my family now that I have fled the only area that supports my compulsory welfare card, because the whole town was alight (28)? Who do I go to for help? There are plenty of trauma hotlines which are, of course, understaffed and overbooked, but what of the fractured communities? What of my support network, suddenly shattered under the weight of desperation? Where is the funding to rebuild the town hall, community support groups, social housing, ongoing healthcare to treat the conditions caused or made worse by the fires and smoke?
South Australia is attempting to address the rebuilding of local economies with the hashtag #bookthemout, arguing that this will rejuvenate cash flow in areas like Kangaroo Island and help the locals to pay for their own recovery efforts (29). However, we must be aware that this will not change the fact that many families have struggled to even access healthcare before, during, and after the acute crisis (30), let alone financial support (31). And I have no doubt that this shared trauma of displacement will only be more fraught for the Indigenous communities that were fractured, many of whom lost significant cultural sites (32). Their return to their homes will only be more difficult.
For some time, I spent most days with dread in the pit of my stomach - not only in fear for the physical safety of those in immediate danger, but in the anticipation that someone would discover they were ineligible for aid because they had been wrongfully issued robodebt, sent a letter to a destroyed and empty home and cut off from their only lifeline. These fires have demonstrated that critical financial aid is withheld due to inadequate communications infrastructure and bureaucratic processes too slow to keep up with disaster. They have reminded us that the “Australian culture of volunteering” is not robust enough to support individuals working full-time hours for weeks on end managing a crisis that will cause the loss of one’s paid job (33) (34) (35).
We cannot afford to restrict our compassion to sad singed koalas when it is our history of wilful negligence of the environment that led to disaster, and our history of wilful negligence of people that leads time and again to massive shared trauma.We need to remember how to be compassionate - not just for acute issues, not only for disaster relief, but persistently, relentlessly, courageously compassionate.
It is debilitating to face something so vast and terrifying and immediate as a bushfire that traps and contains your family and friends. Worse, after a month of hearing about the constant danger and damage and pain occurring to your loved ones, the fear becomes a background character in your life, and you become bored. The best way to manage those feelings is to take a break, recharge, and then find something specific that you can do to make a change. Go out and protest, donate what you can to bushfire recovery funds, volunteer your time however you can. When you feel yourself getting sucked into the frustration of confronting our reality, try not to let the frustration turn into despair; frustration is a resource like any other, and can be turned into a furious drive to do something, to make some difference.
So I don’t read about the bushfires any more. Except sometimes, when I am motivated by a furious compassion to drive urgent and immediate change. Because knowledge - of where we are now, how we got here, and how to continue - is a powerful tool, but you can’t use it if you are so mired in compassion fatigue that you begin to disengage. We all have different skills and capacities to offer. Use your resources wisely.
Where to go to make a change:
https://www.dea.org.au/ - Doctors for the Environment Australia has its 2020 conference coming up in April
https://crisis.app/#/ - connects what resources you can offer to the people who need them
https://www.findabed.info/ - offer your spare room to someone displaced by fires
https://conservationvolunteers.com.au/news/2020/01/how-you-can-support-bushfire-recovery/ - Conservation Volunteers are the national bushfire recovery coordinator, they have info on how you can help
https://volunteerfirefighters.org.au/welfare-relief-fund-for-volunteer-rural-firefighters - If you have a little extra to spare, consider donating to the welfare relief fund for volunteer firefighters so they can afford to continue fighting the good fight
https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=7695 - consider using Charity Navigator to find a smaller, local charity if you want to manage the reduction in your donation as a result of administration costs
https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/ - check what your local representative votes for, and encourage them to take action (or continue to take action if you’re lucky).
https://xrsa.com.au/event/adelaide-national-day-of-action/ - consider if attending the next climate protest is right for you