Environmental Legal Research is Changing: Alternating Tenor/Terror of Scholarship, Despair and Self-Care

Abstract

No one can tell us—as individuals—how we should feel about environmental harm, be it upset at individual species loss, distress at systemic level change, or deeper existential angst. That universal truism applies as much to us, as scholars, as it does to us as world-citizens. Recognising that environmental harm is increasingly impacting lived experiences, this commentary both argues that we should not only reflect consciously on how this might affect our scholarship, but that we should proactively take steps to improve our mental health and self-care. Written collaboratively by an environmental lawyer and research clinical psychologists, the commentary concludes that acceptance of the challenges confronting us, and that it is all right to be anxious about them in our own lives, will not necessarily make our scholarship any better but it might allow us to avoid unhelpful, artificial, and potentially painful deep-seated, divisions within ourselves.