Ecological emotional resilience and the role of arts and humanities in face of the environmental crisis

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Many people experience distress and grief regarding the environmental crisis. This raises the need to address what I refer to as ecological emotional resilience, namely, how can we cope with the ecological emotions raised by the ongoing environmental crisis.

From a relational perspective, the healing processes of past and ongoing biodiversity disasters involve both “external” aspects such as community resilience, including human and non-human living beings- from a social or ecological perspective, and “internal” aspects such as emotional resilience, including mental health aspects. A common thread to resilience across scales from the individual to societies is connectedness. The “internal” and “external” aspects are not separable, which means that emotional resilience cannot be achieved only individually, it is grounded on collective emotional resilience and needs to take into account the resilience of multispecies communities and milieus. In this view, arts and environmental humanities can play a central role in building collective ecological emotional resilience by cultivating feelings of connectedness with each other and with other species.

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Laÿna Droz grew up in Switzerland, where she took her first steps in environmental politics. She received her PhD from Kyoto University (Japan) in 2020 for a thesis on cross-cultural environmental ethics.  Her first book titled “The Concept of Milieu in Environmental Ethics, Individual Responsibility within an Interconnected World” was published in 2021. She worked as multilingual communication consultant with the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) before joining the Basque Center for Climate Change (Spain) and the Rachel Carson Center (Germany) as postdoc researcher. She now works at Tokyo University (Japan) as Project Assistant Professor for the Sustainable Society Design Center.Her ongoing research interests include the ecological emotions, meta-ethics of environmentalism, the philosophy of biodiversity science & conservation and intercultural science communication.

Website: www.laynadroz.com

Official bio in Tokyo University: https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/people/k0001_04710.html