Skillful Strategies for Polarized Times

Why learning to attune to the underlying anxieties shared across political divides is a key to climate progress

What does skillful climate practice look like when so much seems to be hurtling backwards? And what if the crisis in the U.S. represents an opportunity to reboot the climate movement to embrace a more attuned, empathic and effective strategy for change? This week we welcome back environmental psychologist Dr Renée Lertzman, a TED speaker, advisor to business executives, governments and nonprofits, and long-time friend of Unthinkable.

Renée has dedicated her career to developing new ways to equip leaders with the kinds of relational and emotional skills needed to address what she sees as the core block to climate action: a failure to work with the deep layers of collective anxiety, fear, grief and shame around the harm that’s being done to the natural world, and that lives in people across the political spectrum, even if it’s mostly barely publicly acknowledged.

Speaking with guest interviewer Matthew Green, an editor at DeSmog and creator of Resonant World, a newsletter serving the global trauma healing movement, Renée says that cultivating our capacity for emotional attunement – especially with those we may disagree with – represents a crucial foundation for developing more effective strategies.

Even as the U.S. seems more divided than it has been in generations, Renée sees the chaos as an invitation to the climate world to move beyond a decades-old “yell, tell and sell” approach to activism, and embrace a more holistic, empathic and psychologically informed strategy.

This conversation grew out of a very powerful article that you wrote for DeSmog where you suggested that there may be ways to bridge the entrenched political divides in the U.S. in particular, but perhaps more broadly as well. Could you say more?

I think that it starts with recognizing what underlies and informs polarization and these opposing worldviews. We have to bring our full selves and hearts to look at what's underneath, which is always anxiety.

It is always about people feeling in some way or another threatened, insecure, anxious, fearful and sad, and maybe a sense of disenfranchisement when those experiences are not met and acknowledged. That energy goes into a place of protection and trying to make order and clarity out of what feels like a highly disordered and chaotic situation.

And that's what psychologists call defense mechanisms or defensive strategies. So I think we start with really getting real about what's actually going on underneath. I'm not talking only about individual psychology: I'm talking about how these things play out collectively and socially and culturally and politically.

So if we really recognize okay, people are feeling scared and anxious, that can really create some openings to cultivate a sense of curiosity and inquiry and compassion. Now, that's a very tall order when you're dealing with perspectives that are antithetical to health and well-being and even, accuracy and sanity – like climate denial, which is the example in the DeSmog piece.

The pathway I'm describing is that when you go in with an attitude of listening and curiosity, and the willingness to put your own perspective aside, and truly be present, things actually shift. It's like alchemy. Things can shift very quickly.

Could recap what you were writing about, because it was a very striking example that went against the grain of many of my assumptions.

So I was approached by a senior Republican advisor for the GOP, who at the time had been commissioned by a Republican philanthropist to create messaging on climate change that would resonate with conservatives.

I partnered with him and his team and trained them in a methodology that I call dialogic relational interviewing – approaching interviews like conversations. They did this kind of listening with conservatives who are literally climate skeptics.

They tested different kinds of phrases and words, and then created a number of scripts, which they tested with focus groups. The participants watch an actor read a script, and use a dial to show how much they're resonating. Of all the scripts they did, there was one that I had them do that seemed really far out: It was basically acknowledging their anxieties, and their ambivalence, which is where people feel conflicted about their aspirations.

It started out with what we appreciate about being American and about wide-open spaces and clean air and water. And then we got into ‘you must be feeling really angry that people are being hypocrites by telling you not to do things while they're flying around the globe. And you might feel really resentful, and you might feel really left out of these key conversations.’

By the end of the two-minute script, the score was almost 90 out of a hundred: They were resonating with a pro-climate message, but it was a message on their own terms.

What this demonstrated was how powerful it can be to inform our messaging through the lens of empathy and attuning, which is the one thing I feel has been missing from the climate space almost entirely.

I love listening to your story about how this Republican operative took on board your invitation to explore empathy and deep listening and discovered that different attitudes towards climate change lie perhaps more in the mind than in the heart.

Exactly. I remember hearing an interview with a man who lived in the Midwest, who ran a car shop. And he said: “If I knew without a doubt that climate change was real, I would quit my job and devote the rest of my life to addressing it.” This is someone who shows up on a survey as a climate skeptic conservative Republican. So there's a lot to unpack there.

There's been a lot of acknowledgment for quite some time that in actuality the majority of humans really do care deeply about climate change, but aren't necessarily engaging. I happen to believe that the way that's being approached is missing the lead: We need to apply human psychology to look at what is keeping people from engaging.

And it's not necessarily about pushing more solutions at people. It's not about cheerleading and trying to be a positivity maven because it's way too late for that. And it's not going to be addressed by ‘righting’ at people by giving them all the moral and ethical imperatives.

None of those things touch what is really involved with the complexities of being a human being, when things are shifting under our feet all the time. What really touches that is attuning to where people feel scared, anxious, paralyzed, insecure, and inadequate – and maybe the shame, guilt, and all this stuff that gets kicked up when we have to confront what human beings have done on the planet, and especially certain segments of human beings from parts of the world who carry more responsibility and accountability. Even if I wasn't directly involved, I'm still part of lineages who generated these crises.

Now that is a perfect psychological storm. It’s like we're going around saying: ‘Hey, look at this. Look at these issues. Oh, and take action!’ And what we're missing is all of that tangle of unacknowledged emotions in the background – most people, as far as I'm concerned, don't even know how to deal with that. So we just check out.

I'm nodding because I'm still a climate journalist at DeSmog, but I'm thinking about in my earlier days when I worked at Reuters as a climate correspondent, and I did all the things that you said.

I recognize now how it's possible to approach people from a very different way of being, which isn't necessarily our default setting.

Yes. It's not the default setting and I think it's really important to have compassion for ourselves and how we approach these issues.

What we're talking about here is counterintuitive for a lot of people, but the reason I can speak about this with a high level of confidence is because it is grounded in evidence-based research that has been established for a very long time. And that's also born out in human wisdom practice.

I feel like we're on the edge of some really profound change in all kinds of ways we can't possibly predict. With that caveat, it feels to me like the established climate spaces seem quite stuck to me in a particular orientation that’s missing the humility and courage to stand up and say, ‘You know what? We need to change our playbook.’

And I'm willing to step up, especially if I'm a white man, I'm willing to step up and say, ‘I don't know all the answers. Let's hear from some other people. Let's hear from some women and let's hear from some people who are trained in maybe trauma therapy or psychology. And let's listen to these Indigenous folks and let's listen to these Black women who have been organizing.’ That's the moment I want to see us step into. And I haven't yet seen it, but it doesn't mean it couldn't happen very soon. Does that resonate with you?

Yes, this to me is the cutting-edge of climate activism in a way, it's unlocking all this stuck energy that isn’t yet reaching the destination that it should. How is your message landing?

I agree with you a hundred percent that this is the leading edge of climate action and climate communications. And I do believe we're starting to see more of a shift in this direction that is more psychologically grounded and capable of evolving our theories of change from ‘yell, tell and sell.’ What we're starting to see more and more is a recognition of the need to join things up more and be more integrated and holistic.

So I am hopeful. I believe that the work I'm doing is situated in this kind of new movement and new era that will be unfolding in the years to come.

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With love,

-Britt