Why Is Environmentalism Failing?
This is the script of the TEDx talk I gave in February 2025. As soon as the video is published, I will post it here.
Prynhawn da, good afternoon.
There are three main approaches to environmentalism in the Western world: the technological, the cognitive, and the behavioural[1]. Are they working?
No. They. Are. Not.
OK that’s a bit unfair, at a local level, there have been some wins, environmentalism has worked, battles have been won. But at an international level, on nearly every global-scale issue, we’re struggling. The situation, in most cases, is getting worse not better. The climate stripes [2] don’t lie:
I turn 45 next week, I've been an environmentalist for a quarter of a century, more than half my life. I've got the grey hairs and these are my climate stripes [point at forehead], I’m worried.
Now, I'm not saying I'm the authority on this. I know people who have been environmentalling for a lot longer than me. But I can, I think, say a few things about what's going on, and what's going wrong.
I’ll start with the three main approaches to environmentalism.
Dominant, at the moment, is the technological approach. A huge amount of faith is being put in technological saviours. We’re told that things like Carbon Capture and Storage, Solar Radiation Management, Sustainable Aviation Fuel, huge solar and wind farms, massive sea walls and flood defences, hydrogen cars, etc, etc… We are told that these things will bail us out of the crisis, or at the very least, protect us from worst of it.
These are reassuring stories, but in the main that is all they are, stories; especially on the mitigation side of things. We should pursue green tech, and it will have some effect on the rate at which the planet heats up, but we should be very wary of those who would have us believe that we can ‘technology’ our way out of this predicament. Very little of this stuff is going to come online soon enough – at a grand enough scale – to prevent the planet from exceeding 2C of warming, in other words, from seriously overheating.
Number two is the cognitive approach. Essentially this is the transfer of knowledge from experts (via educators) to ordinary people. The theory being that when people know a thing or two about the science of climate change, they’ll act rationally and change their ways. Now, it is vital that young people, and adults, are taught about this stuff; we are being horribly let down on this at the moment. Nowhere near enough is being taught about the crisis, and what is being taught is often a sugar-coated version of the truth served up with a side salad of spurious tech and behavioural ‘solutions’.
However – and this is key – even if we were to educate a lot more people, in a lot more depth –that would still not do the trick.
I know more about the climate change than I care to admit – an embarrassing amount really, I should get out more – but I still have an oversized ecological footprint, like way too big.
Why is this?
It’s because, while my levels of environmental knowledge and concern are high and have a strong influence over what I value and what I do, I care about other things too. I care about my family, my friends and my job, but I also care about things like travel, adventure, films, fashion (sort of), music, and art.
I make sacrifices and try to green my behaviour as best I can, but I’m human and need to invest in all these things to feel human in 21st century Britain. I also need to pay the bills and get places on time.
So, there’s a disconnect; we call it the knowledge-action gap [3]. What I know I should be doing for the sake of the planet and what I am actually doing are not the same thing.
This is why the cognitive approach has a limited effect.
Finally, there’s the behavioural approach, which also only kinda works. We know that people can be ‘nudged’ into certain ‘better’ ways of behaving – we can use gimmicks, comedy, bribes, to get people to put their cigarette butts in a bin, or to get their recycling right. Some of this works, for sure, but the effects can wear off pretty quick. You can’t sustain gimmicks and bribes forever, and you can’t keep infantalising people into ‘better behaviour’, the novelty wears off.
Also within the behavioural approach are Government levers. Taxes, rules and regulations are used to discourage bad environmental behaviours, and tax breaks and other incentives are used to encourage good behaviours. Again, this can work, but political will ebbs and flows (to say the least), and sometimes, when it comes to things like subsidies, the money just runs out.
Now, I’ve not trash talked environmentalism for the hell of it, nor because I think the three approaches are bad per se, or done with bad intentions (though some of it is bad, and some of it is done with bad intentions – I’ve been in the room when the greenwash is being applied). But no, I’m not here to say that these three approaches are wrong. What I’m asking is why these approaches still dominate even though they won’t deliver the scale of change required, not even when done in combination. They’re just not sufficient.
To quote the late great comedian Sean Lock. Given the state the planet is now in, environmentalling in these ways is like turning up at an earthquake with a dustpan and brush.
We need an additional approach, something bigger, and more powerful.
The roots of the crisis are deep, very deep, climate change is a symptom of a much bigger, much hairier set of problems. At the heart of them, is a problem that is growing, and that we’ve hidden away from for far too long. If we let it grow anymore, it is going to completely destroy our ability to come together – and we will need to come together – to create the ‘fundamental changes to how society functions’ that even a body as conservative as the IPCC is now saying are necessary [4]. Well, necessary if it is a climate resilient, sustainable society that we want.
The heart of the matter problem is individualism, but not what it was, what it has become.
This is a map of countries coded according to how individualistic they are. The countries shaded red have high scores for individualism, the countries shaded pink are a bit less individualistic, and then those countries shaded green and blue have comparatively lower levels of individualism:
This is drawn from the work of Hikaru Komatsu and colleagues [5], they did it as part of a study to see if there is a relationship between individualism and ecological footprint, turns out (no great shock here), there is. The more individualistic a country is, the higher its ecological footprint is likely to be:
Individualism began as a wonderful thing.
When it started to take root, as an ideology, in the 1950s, people – in the USA first – and then all over the Western world, were freeing themselves from the shackles of institutions, governments, and all kinds of societal and cultural norms that had held them back from expressing themselves.
It was enabled by politicians, who were guided by economists and psychologists, and was an incredibly liberating time. Millions of people started to feel comfortable dressing differently, living differently, having different kinds of relationships, trying different ways of getting intoxicated on a Saturday night.
And, as this happened, something else happened too, culture began to explode as musicians, artists, filmmakers, writers, designers, architects, all started to experiment and innovate at a tremendous pace. The 1960s looked very different to the 1950s, the 1970s looked different to the 1960s, the 80s looked different again; as did the 1990s.
People were excited about the future, and they weren't only imagining what it might be like, they were creating it – together – in real time. So, things changed. Progress happened. Not all people’s, but many people's lives got better, more rewarding, more varied, more spontaneous, more delightful.
But individualism evolved, as did politics, and over the next quarter-century, aided by technological shifts – the internet being key – individualism gradually became hyper-individualism. And hyper-individualism, for many people, is not quite so thrilling, in fact, for some people, it can feel quite lonely, a bit, desolate.
Around the turn of the century, the rate of progress and change started to slow… right… down. The first quarter of the 21st Century has been nowhere near as creative as the half century that came before it.
The differences in terms of culture between now – 2025 – and twenty years ago – 2005 – are nowhere near as big as the differences witnessed between, say, 1985 and 1965. What is ‘new’ now, is often, not actually all that new at all, it is a kind of rehash of previous trends.
We are a quarter of the way through the 21st Century, but culturally, has it even started? Teenagers today, are wearing what I was wearing when I was a teenager in the 1990s, and they’re spending their money on what I was spending my money on, tickets to go see Blur and Oasis.
This lack of progress is sometimes called ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ [6] and the relentless rehashing and reviving of what has come before has been dubbed ‘retromania’ [7]. It is rife in the cultural domain, but it extends into environmentalism too.
We keep relying on the same three approaches – the technological, the cognitive, the behavioural – and do roughly the same things over and over again within these three domains, even though they have a limited effect.
Why? Why are we so stuck?
Well, this is what happens in hyper-individualistic societies, they run out of ideas – the slow cancellation of the future.
It is a crisis of imagination. And, as far as I can tell, there are two main reasons for it:
When we bounce thoughts and insights off each other, and when we daydream; we, human beings, are… ideas machines. But, because of hyper-individualism, we are doing less and less of both and are, therefore, less creative.
Having entertainment at our fingertips 24/7 means we just don’t get bored anymore. And this means that we don’t need to daydream or hang out with friends, or join a club, or go to the pub, to escape the mundanity of life. Instead, we stay at home with our devices, consuming other people’s ideas, while not stopping to dream up any genuinely new ideas of our own.
Thanks to the hyper-individualised world we live in, we spend precious little time pondering the, ‘what if?’ questions, and even less time pondering the ‘what if we did it like this?’ questions. And if we’re not pondering these questions, we’re not going to even imagine alternative, greener, futures, let alone build them. We have retreated into our individual selves, with our individual screens, and individual lives.
But, the bigger problem with hyper-individualism is that it prevents us from coming together.
The individualism, which was lovely and brilliant when it started, was lovely and brilliant because it co-existed with collaboration and community. The ying had a yang. What we have now, with hyper-individualism, is a ying without a yang.
It’s lonely, it’s painful, it makes us fragile, and… impotent, because a society of strongly independent selves, is a fragmented society; which is not really a society at all. It doesn't band together to build the new, or to overthrow oppressive systems. It is also incredibly vulnerable to attack, including from within. Have we ever been more susceptible to those who wish to divide, conquer, and control?
However, HUGE HOWEVER. A remedy to all this might just be starting to emerge. If we can get it right, and do enough of it, its effect will be less dustpan and brush, more bulldozer.
Individualism is never going to go away, but the hyper version of it could be reined in enough to help us, to free us, to, properly, come up with ideas again. But even more importantly, if we can tame the hyper, we will stand a better chance of reconnecting with each other and the planet, and to make that connection deep enough that it develops, within us, the kinship that underpins collective struggle.
What is emerging is a Movement for Interdependence. Through it we are rediscovering ourselves as connected beings; to each other, to other species, and to the Earth itself. We feel less separate, more entangled. And as that happens, we are letting going of the ‘independent self’ as an idea to live by; and embracing, instead, the ‘interdependent self’.
This is not easy to do, not in an economy that grows by splitting us off from one another. But it is starting to happen. Helping people to discover their interdependent self, is a fourth – and much needed – approach to environmentalism.
In truth, this approach has always been there, but only in the margins. It is now, however, building the sort of momentum that might help it become mainstream. Crucial to this is that it intersects and overlaps with efforts in the societal realm, like #CitizensNotConsumers [8] and #DoWith [9] not ‘do to’. Environmentalists are not alone in trying to tackle hyper-individualism.
This approach bands us together and it teaches us to think, to deliberate, to daydream.
And the more it can do this, the more it can help us imagine alternative futures and become a collective force powerful enough to win the struggle for the ‘fundamental changes to how society functions’ that are needed.
So, how to finish? Well, with one of my heroes, Julia Steinberger. She popped up in my feed a couple of weeks ago with this. Who needs AI when Julia Steinberger can sum up your entire Ted Talk in one short tweet?!
What she describes here is what the environmental movement needs to take heed of, and quickly, if it wants to stop failing and start working.
‘We have to learn again what humans are really good at: coming together to discuss, decide, and act.’
That is the work. It is educational, it’s deep, and it is starting to happen.
Hyper-individualism isn’t solely to blame, but it is, I think, playing a huge role in stopping us from tackling the environmental crisis. It is a triple threat:
Hyper individualistic societies (a) have the highest footprints, (b) they run out of ideas, and (c) they are fragmented.
It is for all these reasons, that we cannot afford to ignore it, we need to focus on reining it in.
And this is what the Movement for Interdependence is starting to do.
Join it.
Thank you.