Motivating Collective Climate Action: Reaching People and Shifting Mindsets

Rosie Bell once earned her living on the opera stage. Now a writer working primarily in public climate narrative and inner-outer transformation for sustainability, she collaborates regularly with the Climate Majority Project, the Inner Development Goals Initiative, and the Mindfulness Initiative, with whom she co-authored the landmark policy report “Reconnection: Meeting the Climate Crisis Inside Out.” A mindfulness practitioner and teacher trainee, she brings an academic background in philosophy (University of Edinburgh) and political communication (University of Sheffield) to a decade of work with think tanks, NGOs, thought leaders, and wellbeing innovators. She is co-author and editor of “The Climate Majority Project.”

Geoff Holland: When you were a young woman with an emerging singing career, what did you see in the ‘Big Picture’ view of how humans live on Earth that troubled you and compelled you to become a voice for cultural transformation?

Rosie Bell: It’s been almost 20 years since I set out in music, and a whole lot has changed. Like many people born in wealthier countries in the early 80s, the first millennials, I grew up believing implicitly in a myth of progress. That humanity’s hardest challenges were behind us, that people better qualified than me were getting on with the rest, and that my ethical duty was satisfied by doing no harm, voting for the right people, and grumbling when the wrong people got into power. I was making art (and pulling pints), and I was at peace with my unexamined role in the world, reading The Guardian in the dressing room. It took years to properly grasp that the global systems my lifestyle depended on are fundamentally harmful.

It wasn’t so much a big picture that really changed my way of thinking but a small phrase: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” It’s a blunt tool and not without its own problems in terms of triggering people’s defense mechanisms. But it’s an effective piece of social technology, and for me, it helped reveal my own entanglement in virtually everything I thought I was against— that it wasn’t really enough just to keep outsourcing social responsibility. I got cancer in 2012, and a (thankfully false) terminal diagnosis gave my worldview another good shake. When it came to rebuilding, I had a choice between struggling for my own place in a rarefied art world or directing that energy elsewhere. So, I began a slow process of learning to be useful in a different way.

GH: For thousands of years, human cultures have been male-dominant, with women marginalized and nature reduced to resources for unchecked exploitation. How important is it that women are now claiming their equal rights and taking a leadership role in shifting humanity to a sustainable and nature-friendly course?

RB: It’s worth noting that in high places of climate governance, there’s strong recognition (and hard data) on this point. For excellent reasons, initiatives like the UN SDGs and Earth for All treat gender equality as a foundational condition in sustainability and human wellbeing – not just out of fairness, but because repressing women is such a stunning waste of energy and possibility. The intelligence, talent, and power squandered by denying women education, autonomy, respect, and fair compensation is profligacy the world can’t afford.

When it comes to leadership, the potential that stands to be unlocked through gender balance is still widely underrated. It’s easy to forget the difference between valuing women as a visible goal and actually getting there— and in many ways, we have only just begun. Foundational shifts in mindset, analysis, relationship, and ways of being. What low-hanging fruit for transformation are we still ignoring?

Historically, the same mindset that has treated nature as a resource to be exploited has identified women with nature and exploited them accordingly. But partly for that reason, it’s perilous to ascribe important qualities and roles to women and tacitly deny them to others. So, I’m not in a hurry to insist that the protection of nature requires women at the helm, only because we need this job to belong to everyone— and likewise, the sense of nurture and empathy and the emotional awareness implicit there. We may consider these ‘feminine’ qualities or not, but we should resist reinforcing the view that they’re a woman’s game.

GH: Can you reflect on how modern industrial agriculture makes human food security seriously unsustainable and deeply destructive to the Earth’s environment on which we all depend?

RB: Chemical pollution and soil depletion, plummeting biodiversity, crop vulnerability, supply fragility, industrialized cruelty. The headlines are all familiar. Less widely discussed is the root of this dysfunction in a particular redundant mindset. To make sense even on its own terms, industrial agriculture (and the profit it generates) requires externalities: costs incurred or benefits gained in one entity or system while the price is paid by something outside that system. What we’re finding out far too slowly is that in a complex living system, there’s no such thing.

Massive agribusiness ‘exports’ harm— on a catastrophic scale— the life systems it fundamentally depends on. A system can only survive like that for a while, and the writing has been on the wall for years. Pesticides that protect yield do so only until they wipe out pollinators; deforestation for high-emitting feed crops supports animal ‘products’ only until climate instability causes massive crop failure. Run-off, disease, habitat destruction… there’s always a reckoning that threatens agriculture itself with collapse. Profiteering isn’t just parasitic within this failing system. We don’t need to preserve the most profitable industrial practices to protect food security. It’s ultimately self-defeating.

We’re unlikely to ‘fix’ any of this at the symptom level – or rather, we must, but it won’t be enough. A planetary survival strategy has to include the ability of leaders to think in whole systems and, for a start, hold big agribusiness accountable for environmental costs. Whether big agribusiness can properly account for the cost it incurs and survive itself is another question. I encountered these arguments – not my own – as I was recovering from cancer for a second time, and the parallels weren’t lost on me. No cell survives long-term by operating an extractive, system-killing agenda; we live or die now as a whole. Of all the big ideas, perhaps that’s the one we most need to land. It can start to sound obvious, but we’re still trying to manage our world in silos.

GH: The Australia-based Council for the Human Future has presented a very big idea called the Earth System Treaty (EST) with the intention to bring people around the world together behind the Treaty’s defining principles. As a voice for the Climate Majority Project, do you think that the world needs a big idea; a beacon that people can commit to collectively that can translate into useful political power to effect change?

RB: The Climate Majority Project (CMP) is a young initiative, so we know well that energy and resources in the existing climate movement are finite. What we need most, therefore, are strategic leverage points. Big ideas can certainly be that. But given that the world doesn’t entirely lack big ideas, what’s not working as well as we hoped it would, and why?

What’s missing in the climate and ecological movement? Is it that our ideas aren’t big enough? Or not beautiful enough? Are they the wrong ideas? Are they insufficiently comprehensive? Or do we not know what to do with them? Which is a slightly different question.

Runaway climate breakdown is a pretty big idea. At great cost and effort, we have come together at an intergovernmental level to agree that this is happening and design a bare minimum plan to avoid the worst consequences, but when it comes to implementation, leaders have struggled to sell even the shallowest climate measures to their electorates. Almost a decade after the Paris Agreement, warming has already crossed the red line of 1.5°C for over a year, yet not a single G20 country is reducing emissions at pace with their own drastically inadequate net-zero targets.

EST fixes upon an important piece missing from current global treaties— the legitimacy that comes from a mass mandate. When it comes to building that mandate, looking at the way things have unfolded over the last decade, big ideas may be necessary-but-insufficient. The CMP concerns itself with asking what it takes to build that mandate.

Humanity doesn’t have a big idea deficit or lack an urgent basis for intergovernmental agreement so much as it struggles to turn what it already knows into appropriate behaviour. We don’t only have a knowledge-action gap. We also have an intention-action gap. We aren’t able to do even what we have agreed to do, and we don’t put enough energy into finding out why.

We have a catastrophic collective action problem, and attention to this is paramount as part of any new platform. A significant majority of people already polls as ‘concerned’ about climate. But there’s a gulf between that concern and tangible action. The CMP directs its energy towards understanding the unseen barriers, and supporting people to bridge that gap. 

GH: These days, humans almost everywhere are overwhelmed by an onslaught of attention-grabbing media misinformation. Can the Earth System Treaty become the social media antidote that can inspire every brand of humanity across the planet to come together behind a worthy common purpose?

RB: In the current social media landscape, people aren’t just subject to a barrage of misinformation. Increasingly, that misinformation is tailored especially to them, with the effect of entrenching existing views in opposition to others. Attention is the foundation of everything we do— including which ideas we adopt— and the algorithms that capture and sell our attention become ever more sophisticated. How would an effective antidote to this mechanism need to function? Much socially motivated innovation is devoted to answering this question and trying to disrupt this powerful attention economy. These dynamics aren’t fundamentally insurmountable, but so far, it appears likely that without intervention in the form of regulation, this system is too powerful to simply out-maneuver.

To succeed in uniting people, an idea must, at a bare minimum, reach people without becoming distorted. The fragmenting, polarizing architecture of the social media world ensures that where an idea does achieve a large reach, it will likely meet as much motivated resistance as support, which extends to distortion and misinformation.

In a politically diverse population, in a population where reality itself is subject to heated debate, what makes a unifying idea? Even without manufactured resistance, big ideas have as much potential to divide as to unite— even when they are scientifically founded and intended for the survival of all. How to reach past polarizing dynamics and the psychological biases that cause us to reject information that scares us or contradicts our existing beliefs? How to not just present a new idea to many people but validate an idea many already share? These are very live questions for the CMP because, to succeed, we need to motivate participation in climate action outside a particular cultural bubble, and the current social media world is very good at reinforcing those bubbles.

GH: How important is it to enlist cultural leaders from a wide range of human constituencies to become voices for a big idea like the Earth System Treaty, and to find creative ways to spread awareness of and cultural commitment to the principles of the Treaty?

RB: Particularly given the landscape we’ve just discussed, it’s vital to enlist advocates within the many, very different communities this affects – not just at the stage of communicating an idea but arguably when designing it, too. Different constituencies have different priorities, and for many, those priorities are unavoidably closer to home than still-abstract, whole-world problems. Cultural commitment is best established through cultural relevance. Cultural leaders may be among those best placed to educate others about the needs and priorities of their groups and interpret a global story with localized relevance in ways that those outside that community cannot. To crowd-source a mandate for global change, there needs to be dialogue in some ways, as opposed to one-way transmission.

The world is struggling with a paradox. Massive, interconnected crises threaten all of humanity and the life systems we belong to, but humanity doesn’t experience itself as interconnected day-to-day. Intuitively, there’s no job to ‘include’ people in a crisis that already includes everyone – but realistically, communication has to find properly inclusive routes in order to land. As protest groups have discovered, one way of expressing this threat may not immediately appeal to all. As you say, creativity is necessary to build ownership of such an idea among different constituencies so that it isn’t just offered from outside but integrates their unique relationship with the whole show.

Perhaps it’s not so much cultural leaders transmitting ideas as culturally-led education and participation that can allow big ideas to take root and flourish. Intuitively, that’s the depth of engagement that a global initiative needs, especially if it’s going to become law, with transformative implications for the way that people live. Even when all you’re asking people to do is ‘sign up.’ So that principle you mention is very aligned with CMP, which, for example, incubates a number of initiatives that creatively engage local communities in their own conversation around climate, giving a sometimes-abstract idea more reality and connecting people with the sort of action that feels feasible, inclusive, and relevant.

GH: How might an idea like mindfulness relate to the Earth Systems Treaty, supporting its potential to bring citizens across cultures together behind a particular set of principles?

RB: When it comes to motivating collective action on the staggering scale that it will take to get out of, or, more realistically, through this mess, properly expressing the material problem statement is very important. But the human mind and heart— how we perceive, think, feel, and choose, not to mention how we repress, deny, avoid, and delay— is a giant piece of the picture that receives astonishingly little attention when we consider our collective response to global crises. The idea of humans as rational agents choosing in our own best interests based on good information is wildly oversimplified and out of date. Our main deficit isn’t in knowledge about the problems we face or what we could do to fix them. It’s knowledge about what’s stopping us from doing it.

Over the last few years, I’ve worked with organizations advocating not just for mindfulness but for a whole undervalued and crucial dimension of inner capacities and considerations fundamental to sustainability and collective action problems. 

Mindfulness is a particularly helpful capacity and frame in this regard because of its tendency to support meta-awareness of what’s going on inside as well as out— our reactivities, thought processes, motivations, and aversions. As leaders or citizens, it can support us in protecting our attention and examining new ideas and different perspectives in support of the kind of worldview shift implicit in the EST. In helping us to choose where we direct our attention and care, mindfulness can support intentional reconnection with, rather than disconnection from, ourselves, other people, and the natural world.

Advocates of EST are right— at the level of global governance, no big idea goes far enough in naming the many interconnected ‘megathreats’ facing humanity and the need to integrate their solutions. Such little attention is paid to the relationship between different fragile systems. To properly grasp the danger that the world is in and to support whatever deep change is necessary requires a sense of interdependence and of life as a whole. Some constituencies are way ahead of us, and many others throughout society maintain a worldview based on separateness, with a myriad of structures and institutions entrenching this view. EST is essentially calling for a widespread mindset shift, and to contemplate this demands due consideration of the human mind itself.

Stay tuned for more of The Earth System View series!