Harrison Schmitt on Environmental Contamination and Suffering
Harrison Schmitt is a PhD student at the University of Arizona, where he studies Social Psychology and Public Health. He is currently an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. He completed his B.A. in psychology at California State University, Fresno with Dr. Robert V. Levine. Broadly, he studies how culture shapes the ways that individuals cope with suffering, such as financial debt and chronic environmental contamination, and their reciprocal impact on psychological health and social organization of time. In his work, he seeks to employ multi-method approaches and to maintain interdisciplinarity in the study of social issues.
By Kenneth Vail, Cleveland State University. Feb 24, 2021.
ISSEP: How did you first become aware of and interested in existentialism and existential psychology?
Harrison Schmitt: My introduction to existential psychology was through Spee Kosloff, a psychology professor at California State University, Fresno, where I did my undergraduate. I never took a class from him; instead, I knew him through the local jazz scene and then I saw him give a talk at a “Central Valley Café Scientifique” event where local scholars get together at a bar to discuss their research. Spee gave a fantastic talk about TMT and the role of death anxiety in the political divisiveness of the contemporary US. It sort of blew my mind at the time, and I started reading up more on TMT afterward.
The strange thing is that, before hearing that talk, I had already applied to work with Dr. Daniel Sullivan who had been one of Spee’s research assistants at the University of Arizona a decade earlier. My research interests, back then, pertained to the cultural psychology of time and environmental psychology. But I began to explore the “existential” implications of my research interests following Spee’s talk, as I prepared to move to Tucson for the Social Psychology PhD program at the University of Arizona.
ISSEP: In 2021, your research won the Innovation in Existential Psychology Research Award, sponsored by ISSEP. Can you tell us about your work?
TIAA Superfund Site map, showing trichloroethene (TCE) plume contamination. Acute exposure to TCE can cause central nervous system depression and death, and chronic exposure is thought to be carcinogenic.
Harrison Schmitt: My research focused on the experience of living through chronic environmental contamination (CEC), when hazardous substances are thought to be present in the air, water, or soil at elevated levels for a prolonged period of time. Michael Edelstein calls it the “plague of our time,” with 1 in 6 Americans living within 4 miles of a hazardous waste site. Figures like that illustrate that CEC is much more common than we realize. To clean up the contamination, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is cleaning over a thousand “Superfund” sites. The Superfund Program, and other clean-up efforts, often focus on the impacts to the physical environment and health, but only rarely to psychological health.
Our first project to fill that gap was to organize the research literature for the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. With CEC, the contamination typically can’t be attributed to a single event, as with a natural disaster (e.g., tornado). That causal ambiguity can cause social fragmentation because it’s not always immediately clear who the responsible party is, often leading to lengthy and messy litigation, uncertainty about who has been affected, and victim-blaming. The result is psychological stress, prolonged suffering, and tension between communities and institutions.
Our next project focused on a Superfund Site in Tucson, AZ (USA), called the Tucson International Airport Area (TIAA), located in a largely Latinx and low-income community. Industrial and military activity had contaminated the groundwater there from the 1940s-1970s, and it was designated a Superfund Site in 1983. The water currently served to the TIAA is clean and closely monitored by the Tucson Water Department, but many people there lived through the decades of active contamination and uncertainty about whether delayed-onset illnesses may surface. First, we conducted a qualitative study with contamination-impacted residents, to get a full sense of the psychological experience of living through this historic contamination. Then, we designed an experimental study based on those interviews, to test possible ways to foster resilience against suffering. We’re continuing to work with the community to further study the psychological impacts of CEC and identify pathways to community resilience.
ISSEP: How did you develop an interest in using a multi-method approach to learn more about the impact of culture on the experience of existential threat?
In January 2015, lead contaminated the water supply in Flint, MI with long-term damage. Upper panel shows January 2015 water samples with an overlaid graph of lead concentration levels; lower panel shows continued community impact years later (March 2017).
Harrison Schmitt: I’ve been interested in environmental issues for quite a while. My brother’s an environmental scientist and I’ve always felt at home in nature. One thing that spurred my interest further was learning, in my undergraduate training, about the prominent environmental justice issues of the past few years, such as the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the disproportionate impact of various natural disasters on BIPOC communities. I also soon came to realize that these are just the most well-known environmental crises, among a broader swath of similar yet more mundane problems. Without first-hand experience, it’s difficult to grasp the effect of these events on people—whether it’s anger, injustice, or a more generally shattered sense of safety. So, that’s how I became interested in studying how people experience and cope with these less-visible kinds of environmental justice issues.
I also think the multi-method approach is really important. There’s so much research in environmental sociology, geography, public health, and community psychology that can inform how we study the existential implications of such a unique and invisible threat as CEC. Experimental designs are useful, but they can only get us so far in regard to real-world social issues. The “lived experience” of CEC can’t be easily manipulated, or even approximated, in the lab, so I think it’s really important to actually engage with the concrete realities of those most impacted.
I take a lot of inspiration from the literature on community-based participatory research, which advocates for the inclusion of the participating community in all phases of the research process: from formulating research questions, to analyzing data, to disseminating findings. The approach often entails multiple methods of inquiry, from exploratory qualitative work, to engagement with historical and archival data, to the development of interventions. When we combine this boots-on-the-ground approach with the experimental approach, we can both learn about existential psychology and help develop practical solutions for communities in need.
ISSEP: In what ways does your research help us make sense of important human experiences, better understand important events, or inform our cultural or technological trends?
Harrison Schmitt: Research on chronic environmental contamination helps sheds light on issues of empathy, freedom, and responsibility in the context of power and privilege. BIPOC and low-income communities typically bear the brunt of CEC and the associated threats to physical and mental health. When contamination is discovered, higher-income residents may simply relocate, while lower-income residents may be unable to leave, especially as their property values plummet in the contaminated area. Additionally, experts and scientists from environmental and public health agencies often see contamination as an abstract problem for science to solve, while impacted residents experience it firsthand as an urgent existential threat.
ISSEP: You’ve been studying these issues using psychological science. Do you see your research topic being dealt with in interesting ways by the arts?
Clockwise from top left: Children of Men (2006); Roma (2018); Son of Saul (2015); Come and See (1985).
Harrison Schmitt: I’m a real big film nerd, so I tend to see connections between the things I study and certain films. When I think of “Cultural-Existential Psychology,” I think of big systems of cultural norms and values, of religious beliefs, of governments, and so on. We can learn a lot about these cultural systems when things go wrong: during war, famine, disaster, oppression, and other kinds of collective trauma. Cultural systems provide people with ways to respond to and cope with traumatic events, but the collective traumas can also cause cultures to adapt and change. I think a few films capture the essence of such twisty, mutually constitutive relationships without losing touch with the really personal journey of the focal characters.
Some such films are Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men and Roma, László Nemes’ Son of Saul, and Elem Klimov’s Come and See. On the surface they might seem dissimilar, but I see a really cool common thread that runs through each. In each film, there is some big collective, existentially threat—disaster, war, social unrest. Additionally, in each film there is also a fairly narrow focus on the main character’s personal, individual, and subjective journey through the threatening situation at hand. They all tell fascinating stories that deftly combine the most personal with the most collective, as the main characters find their own stories’ most pivotal moments matching up with the central moments of the grander background narrative.
When interviewing people who have been impacted by more mundane environmental threats, like water contamination, I saw these narratives play out in the real world. Many impacted individuals’ stories became intertwined with grander and more collective cultural narratives of environmental justice.
“I hope we can embrace new methodological approaches and incorporate interdisciplinary theoretical lenses to more richly contextualize our analyses of existential issues.”
ISSEP: What do you think are some of the remaining issues in studying cultural-existential psychology?
Harrison Schmitt: I hope we can embrace new methodological approaches and incorporate interdisciplinary theoretical lenses to more richly contextualize our analyses of existential issues. Individual people are always embedded in broader social structures and historical contexts as they experience the world. If we want to understand how individuals cope with existential concerns, we need to understand the historical, political, economic, and cultural contexts that shape that individual, and vice versa.
ISSEP: You’ve attended, and presented research at, our Existential Psychology Pre-conference; how has your experience been with that event?
In 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe protested the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which posed a crude oil contamination risk. Photo: Rob Wilson/PeoplesDispatch.org
Harrison Schmitt: I really enjoyed this year’s Existential Psychology Preconference. This was my first time attending this preconference and I was really impressed. The research that was presented throughout the day was quite diverse in terms of topics, theoretical lenses, and methodological approaches. What a cool demonstration of how applicable existential psychology can be to such a diverse array of social issues! One highlight for me was hearing Dr. Louis Hoffman’s talk about existential psychotherapy, empathy, and racial injustices against BIPOC communities. I thought it was a great way to begin a healthy dialogue between different epistemological approaches to doing psychology. In my experience, these kinds of discussions usually occur outside or at the margins of psychology, so it was really refreshing to hear a talk like that being featured in the day’s events.
ISSEP: What is one piece of advice you would give to future students who have an interest in following in your footsteps?
Harrison Schmitt: One important piece of advice is to read widely. There is so much to be learned from disciplines outside of psychology, and so much inspiration to be gained from scholars with different personal and academic backgrounds. For me, it’s been helpful to take courses from different departments whenever possible. As an undergrad, I minored in Spanish and earned a certificate in Global Awareness, both of which allowed me to take courses in history, sociology, global studies, and multicultural studies. In graduate school, I’ve taken several courses in public health that further shaped my thinking about the research process and the importance of interdisciplinarity. Taking courses isn’t the only way to read more widely, of course, but it’s a useful springboard for exploring other disciplines and stimulating interesting research.
ISSEP: Can you tell us a little about yourself outside the research context?
Harrison Schmitt: Outside of the research context, I play music and do a lot of cooking. I play drums in a few local bands here in Tucson, though I actually prefer to think of myself as a guitarist. I played guitar in jazz bands throughout high school and college, but lately I’ve been playing a lot more drums. Music has always been a happy escape from academic pursuits, and it’s something I hope to continue doing in the future.
ISSEP: A lot of us like to listen to music in the lab; what are you listening to lately?
Harrison Schmitt: I also love listening to music while I work. Lately, I’ve been revisiting one of my favorite Chick Corea albums “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs.” Chick passed away recently, so it feels like a nice way to honor his memory, and it’s just such a masterful album start to finish.