For decades, the climate, regeneration, conservation and environmental sectors operated on a simple, if unspoken, theory of change: inform or inspire people, then expect them to act. Fill the gaps in knowledge. Remove the barriers. Change the behavior. Push solutions. Exhort action. Rinse and repeat. And when none of that worked, try harder. Amp up the urgency.
When a crisis hits—a devastating wildfire, flooding, drought, unprecedented heatwaves—then we get louder, as if to say, “See? This is what will happen. Do something!”
That old approach is finally starting to crack open. And what’s emerging in its place is something more honest, human, and arguably more effective: a recognition that this work is fundamentally about asking people to change. To confront difficult truths. And about applying relational psychology.
The problem with “behavior change”
The dominant paradigm for so many decades, the “behavior change” model, assumed that the reason people weren’t acting on climate and related existential planetary threats, was due to a deficit of information, motivation, knowledge or willpower.
If people just knew more, cared more, or had fewer structural barriers in their way, the theory goes, they’d do the right thing.
But over time, researchers, practitioners, and anyone who has sat with real people talking about real climate change and ecological crises, have started to sense something was off with this approach.
What started to become more clear, is that underneath resistance, projection, numbing, blame and inaction, is not actually apathy. People did care. Many cared deeply. They just weren’t translating that care into action, due to a variety of reasons. Maybe it’s overwhelm. Maybe it’s a sense of moral injury. Perhaps it’s feeling that the issues are too fast and systemic. And calling a non-activated response an “attitude-behavior gap” or a “perception-action gap” didn’t explain anything. It just renamed the puzzle. This notion of a “gap” only reinstates an old, super-outdated model, that has little relationship with what we now know about how humans process and metabolize charged, challenging and threatening information about our world.
What’s more, the concept of “barriers,” still ubiquitous in the field, smuggles in a mechanistic worldview that does damage. A barrier implies something external to be removed. Or something to get over, like a piece of concrete or barricading. A barrier doesn’t invite curiosity or dialogue.
Contrary to something fixed to either move, win over, get buy-in from, get over or overcome, we are starting to realize that what actually impedes action is also internal, emotional, deeply relational to one’s sense of self and place in the world: anxiety, ambivalence, grief, complicity, the fear of losing things we love even as we know they’re contributing to harm.
You can’t nudge your way through that.
Fear-based appeals, once the default tool since the 1970s, are now widely understood to backfire. Making things more urgent and visceral doesn’t necessarily move people; it can paralyze them, trigger denial, or generate a kind of emotional overwhelm that leads straight to avoidance. As British researchers O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole and so many others have documented on climate comms over the years, powerful feelings of issue salience don’t automatically translate into a felt capacity to act. They can, in fact, do the opposite.
This does not, however, mean we have to default to becoming rah-rah positivity pushers and cheerleaders, either. We don’t need to peddle solutions to engage people on taking action on our most urgent existential threats.
There is another way.
What trauma research has been saying all along
Here’s where things get interesting. While the climate and environmental communication fields has been (God bless) running in circles trying to crack the engagement problem, there was already a rich body of thought, hidden in trauma, psychoanalytic and psychosocial research, along with wisdom traditions, that had been working on exactly these dynamics for decades.
The American psychiatrist Harold Searles wrote about this in 1960 in his groundbreaking and prescient book, The Nonhuman Environment in Normal Development and in Schizophrenia. Searles is considered one of the first psychologists to turn their attention to our ecological crisis. The nonhuman environment, he argued, is not peripheral to human psychological experience: it is central to it. And the Western, industrial, euro-centric collective tendency to dissociate from our embeddedness in natural systems, to split off our dependence on the living world, has deep psychological roots. It isn’t ignorance. It isn’t apathy in any simple sense. It’s an active, if largely unconscious, psychic defense, against recognizing our inherent interdependencies with our living world.
In addition to this inheritance of disconnection, are the defense mechanisms humand deploy to protect ourselves from overwhelm, helplessness and unwanted, difficult, threatening information.
Rather than apathy or indifference, many of the people we seek to reach are simply deploying the minds’ mechanisms for self-protection and maintaining a status quo.
That reframe matters enormously.
Apathy is not indifference, it is protection. Shierry Nicholsen, another pioneering existential psychologist, put it beautifully in her book, The Love of Nature and the End of the World, that apathy is “a miracle of protection by which personality in utter fiasco rests until it can do something else.” When advocates despair at public apathy, i.e. ‘inaction,’ they may be encountering something closer to a collective form of psychic holding: people managing an experience that is genuinely overwhelming, in a culture that provides almost no support for reckoning with the massive existential threats of our world today.
The psychosocial research that has followed since Searles in the 1960s, including my work, British psychologist Rosemary Randall’s work on loss and mourning, Sally Weintrobe’s on denial and the culture of uncare, the emerging field of climate psychology more broadly—such as Steffi Bednarek, Paul Hoggett, Caroline Hickman, Leslie Davenport, Britt Wray, Panu Pihkala, and many more—all points in the same direction.
The emotional and relational dimensions of our existential crises aren’t soft additions to the “real” work.
They are the work.
And if people’s apparent inaction reflects not indifference but anxiety, ambivalence, aspirations, desires and grief, if care exists in surplus, not deficit—then the entire orientation of the field has to shift.
The practitioner’s job isn’t to manufacture concern. It’s to make it safe for the concern that’s already there to come forward.
Something is shifting
I knew we had reached a new moment in the climate space, when I learned that the initiative, the UK-based National Emergency Briefing (NEB), had partnered with the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA). (Finally, woohoo!!!) The NEB produced a documentary, The People’s Emergency Briefing (PEB) and the CPA will provide optional facilitation trainings to foster spaces to discuss and debrief following screenings. It seems simple, but it’s not.
This one intervention reflects decades of ongoing attempts to evolve and update how we do our existential and climate work, to apply best practices in human psychology and trauma work.
Harold Searles wrote his book in 1960. Researcher Baruch Fischoff wrote one of the first academic papers on the subject, Psychological Dimensions of Climate Change, in 1983. I gave my first conference paper in 1993 at age 25, called Ecological Trauma, asserting that climate and environmental awareness can have a traumatic response yet to be fully understood. The Climate Psychology Alliance in the UK (CPA) was founded in 2009, and later the CPA-North America.
So many other initiatives, research and advocacy you may not have heard of, are leading us to this moment.
Now, more recently, we are seeing cohorts of global climate and ecological leaders meditate with monks at Plum Village via the brilliant Outrage + Optimism community, frameworks as the Inner Development Goals, the Climate Museum UK, and a growing number of initiatives linking climate and environmental work to inner capabilities, and relational intelligence. The Climate Psychology Alliance-North America is gaining traction.
It seems more mainstream sustainability and climate institutions are taking note. Kite Insights’ Debatable. format is increasingly embraced by events and conferences as a shot of oxygen into the usual panel/one-way/sage-on-stage format of most impact convenings. People want to be relating. They want to engage. They want conversation. They want a relational approach.
And, there’s Project InsideOut, funded by the KR Foundation and 11th Hour Project, which my experiment to create tools and resources translating trauma psychology, neurosciences and psychodynamic practice for leaders, activists, educators and advocates—created under the advising of many of our leading climate and environmental psychologists and strategists. This led to a playbook—and the 5 Guiding Principles—I’ve now introduced and trained hundreds of leaders and teams in, and the heart of my new book.
These aren’t isolated experiments.
They represent a maturing of theory—a growing recognition that relational, psychological, and emotional intelligence aren’t peripheral to climate work.
They are what the next era of the movement actually looks like.
What “growing up” actually means
Movements mature when they stop blaming their audiences, stop focusing on superficial survey and polling data about whether people ‘care’ or not—and start getting curious about them. When they invest in training people to develop new skillsets such as listening, attuning, empathy and navigating conflicts when the stakes are so high. When they trade the language of gaps and barriers, for something more honest about what’s actually happening inside people. When they recognize that guilt, fear, and shame—the dominant affective currencies of environmental and climate communications—tend to suppress the very impulse to act, rather than ignite it.
The existential changemaking (climate, conservation, environment) field is just beginning to understand that what people need isn’t more information delivered with greater urgency.
What they need is to feel received. To have their “Three A’s— Anxiety, Ambivalence and Aspirations—acknowledged and reflected. To know that their care matters, that contributing something is possible, that they won’t be met with contempt for how they’ve lived so far. That they won’t be hounded to “act” before they’ve actually contemplated what action makes most sense for them.
Most importantly, a movement grows up when we meet the messy and complicated experiences of confronting our world with compassion, attunement, and presence. With wit and humor. That is when the magic happens. What’s when we access our capacities to turn our care into direct, tangible expressions in the world.
That’s not naive optimism. That’s what the evidence, and decades of clinical knowledge, has been pointing toward all along.
The climate and environmental movements may finally be catching up.
Please join me in exploring this frontier.
With care and love,
Renée
"The practitioner’s job isn’t to manufacture concern. It’s to make it safe for the concern that’s already there to come forward."
Brilliant. I used to work at the IEA's "World Energy Outlook" Team on modeling and promoting the role of "behaviour change". And while I still believe there is no "systemic change" without us individuals, it never sat right with me to go about it through fear-based calls to action, financial incentives or policy mandates only. What about our emotions around this unprecedented unraveling? What about our psychological capacities in the face of it, and what about the illness behind all of it, our relationship to the living world? I left this job and was long unsure or unable to articulate what was missing for me - you formulated it here. Thank you for writing this.