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 approach is finally starting to crack open. And what’s emerging in its place is something more honest, more human, and arguably more effective: a recognition that this work is fundamentally relational.
The problem was always the frame
The dominant paradigm for so many decades—what I’d call the “behavior change” model—assumed that the reason people weren’t acting on climate and related existential planetary threats, was a deficit of information, motivation, or willpower. If people just knew more, cared more, or had fewer structural barriers in their way, the theory went, they’d do the right thing.
What actually impedes action is internal, emotional, deeply relational to one’s sense of self and place in the world.
But over time, researchers, practitioners, and frankly anyone who has sat with real people talking about climate change and ecological crises, have started to sense something felt off with this approach. Under the defenses of projection, numbing, blame and inaction, is not 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 This notion of a “gap” only reinstates an old, super-outdated model, that has little relationship with what we now know about how humans process and metabolize charged, challenging and threatening information about our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 real damage. A barrier implies something external to be removed. Or to get over, like a piece of concrete or barricading. A “barrier” doesn’t invite curiosity or dialogue.
Contrary to something fixed to move, get over or overcome, much of we are starting to realize more and more, is what actually impedes action is 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 imagery 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 and Depth Psychology 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. The nonhuman environment, he argued, is not peripheral to human psychological experience: it is central to it. And our 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.
That is to say, a defense mechanisms against experiences that feel overwhelming, challenging or intolerable.
That reframe matters enormously. Apathy, as Searles put it, is not indifference, it is protection. Shierry Nicholsen, another pioneering psychologist, put it beautifully in her book, The Love of Nature and the End of the World — 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 that kind of reckoning.
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.
The psychosocial research that has followed, including my work, 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 when I recently learned that the new 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 years of ongoing attempts to evolve and update how we do our climate work, that reflects best practices in human psychology and trauma work.
Harold Searles wrote his book on environmental psychology 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 practitioner’s job isn’t to manufacture concern. It’s to make it safe for the concern that’s already there to come forward.
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.
This article was originally published in Becoming Guides. It is shared here with permission.
