We Know the Climate Crisis Is Real. So Why Don't We Act?

We know more about the climate crisis — with more certainty, more precision, and more scientific consensus — than any previous generation has known about any threat to its own survival. We also, somehow, manage to not really think about it that much. At least not in any sustained way, or not in any way that fundamentally changes how most of us live our daily lives.   

What I can’t stop thinking about — and why I’ve launched this line of inquiry — is the strangeness of our stillness. We are the most informed generation in human history on the subject of our own existential risk. And we are moving — individually, organizationally, collectively — far too slowly to meet the moment. 

This is not about denial, exactly — denial would be simpler, more legible, more treatable. Studies show that there is actually fairly broad acknowledgement and acceptance of the scientific evidence backing climate change predictions and that most people understand the very real danger we are in if we don’t take action and quickly.  

Instead I think our collective inaction stems from something stranger: a kind of suspension, a learned capacity to acknowledge a fact of this magnitude without quite letting it land. 

I've been sitting with this paradox for some time now — and I've come to think that those of us promoting the narrative around sustainability in an effort to engage and motivate action have been, consistently and at great expense, trying to solve the wrong problem. 

What if this is not an information problem? 

I’ve been teaching sustainability to business students for a few years now. Last semester, I taught Business Ethics and Sustainability to 204 undergraduate students in the large lecture hall at the Western Michigan University Haworth College of Business — and what those students taught me about how we actually relate to sustainability was more clarifying, and more humbling, than I anticipated. 

On the first day of class, I had them complete a survey that asked them to say which of the following best characterized their attitude toward sustainability.  

Were they a Believer (already convinced that sustainability mattered, looking for the how)?, 

Were they a Skeptic (unconvinced, still weighing the evidence, reserving judgment)? 

Or were they Disillusioned (understands the danger, believes the science, but has lost faith in the solutions or just isn’t inspired enough to act).  

While a little less than half of the class identified as a Believer, nearly a quarter of the students in the room that day identified as Disillusioned and another third as Skeptics.  

I also asked them to write the one question they hoped the course would answer. The most common question, by a significant margin and across every self-identification category, was some variation of: What can I do? Not "what is the problem?" Not "what does the data show?" Those they already had. The question was agency — whether there was any bridge between knowing and acting, between caring and actually moving something in the world. 

A smaller cluster asked the existential version of the same question: Is it worth it? Can we really change? 

And then there was one line, from a student who had identified as Disillusioned, that I have been thinking about ever since: Why does sustainability actually matter? 

Let that sit for a moment. Not "what is it?" — they knew what it was. Not "is it real?" — they'd moved past that. This was someone who had already engaged, already tried to care, and arrived at a question that no amount of additional data could answer, because it wasn't a data question. It was the question underneath all the other questions — the one that tends not to get asked in polite sustainability discourse, perhaps because it sounds like a failure of individual character rather than a structural failure of how we've been framing the issue. 

The thing that moved them most that day, as it happened, was a video — Patagonia's "Don't Buy This Jacket" campaign, the company asking its own customers not to purchase unless they truly needed to. When students wrote what they'd liked best about that day’s class, nearly one in ten named it unprompted, across every self-identification category. One wrote just four words: Don't buy this jacket. Not a model, not a metric, not a policy framework. A story — and one built around a refusal to be careless — that made the whole thing feel, briefly and genuinely, human. 

The stories we tell matter.  

Here is what we have consistently done in response to the knowing-doing gap, and have been doing for decades. We publish more reports, fund more research, build more sophisticated models, redesign curricula to include more sustainability content more urgently framed, develop more compelling business cases — financial arguments for why doing the right thing also happens to serve the bottom line — and create new metrics, new indexes, new frameworks for measurement and disclosure. All of this matters, genuinely; I am not dismissing any of it. But none of it is closing the gap, and at some point the accumulating evidence suggests that more of the same is not going to close it either. (The gap between environmental knowledge and meaningful action has been documented across behavioral psychology, environmental science, and organizational theory for decades — this is not a new observation. What is less examined is why our standard responses to it keep failing.) 

The assumption underneath all of it — unexamined, almost never stated aloud — is that people would act if they understood clearly enough. That the barrier is informational: incomplete, poorly communicated, not yet sufficiently alarming. So we add more information, more urgency, more data — more of the thing that isn't working, on the theory that eventually a sufficient quantity of it will tip the scale. 

But watch what actually happens. The student who writes I know this is a crisis in the same breath as I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it is not suffering from a data deficit or a lack of belief. The executive who acknowledges climate risk in the annual report and continues making decisions that compound it is not missing a fact that would change the calculation. They are missing something else. And we keep handing them more of what they already have. 

Worse, when the communication does land, it tends to land wrong. The dominant register of sustainability discourse — urgent, dire, accusatory — makes people feel guilty, personally implicated in a harm too large for any individual to meaningfully address. And guilt, it turns out, is among the least effective motivational states available to us. Tell someone that their very existence is a problem, that the things they love and the life they've built are inimical to a livable future, and what you reliably produce is not transformed behavior but defensiveness, paralysis, or the slow drift toward not thinking about it at all. We have spent decades perfecting the art of making people feel bad about something they don't know how to fix. And we keep being surprised when they look away. 

And even if the guilt produced motivation — even if alarm and shame somehow moved people from knowing to wanting to act — the systems they would need to act within are not designed to make that wanting count for much. The businessperson who wants to do things differently runs into supply chains, capital structures, and incentive systems built over generations to optimize for something other than a livable future. Individual behavior matters, but the scale of transformation required is organizational, institutional, economic — and at those levels, the structures are not yet ready to receive the motivation, even when it exists. The meaning gap, in other words, is not only psychological. It is structural. And when the pathway from caring to acting is genuinely unclear — when the systems around you are actively, continuously working against the change you know is needed — it becomes entirely rational to turn your head. 

What if this is not an information problem? 

I want to be precise here, because the claim is easy to mishear. I am not suggesting that facts don't matter — they do, enormously — or that science is insufficient, or that the business case for sustainability is irrelevant, or that policy frameworks aren't essential. They are all necessary. What I'm suggesting is something more specific and, I think, more uncomfortable: that knowledge is not, on its own, an animating force. 

Humans don't change through data. Not at the level of sustained behavior, not at scale, not in the way this moment actually demands. Paul Murray's novel The Bee Sting contains one of the clearest articulations of why that I've come across: acting meaningfully on climate change would require most of us to give up the very things — the flights, the cars, the consumption, the comfortable habits of a life we've assembled and an identity we've built around it — that we experience as ourselves. The thought of no longer being ourselves, Murray suggests, is harder for most people to contemplate than the abstract prospect of the crisis. We are not failing to act because we lack the facts. We are failing to act because the action required feels like a threat to the self — and a threat to the self is the most primal threat there is. 

Humans change through meaning — through the stories they inhabit about who they are and what they're part of, through the felt connection between individual action and something larger than the action itself, through the sense that what they do reflects something they genuinely value rather than something they've been told they should. 

Meaning is what makes knowledge motivating. 

And this — precisely this — is what I believe is missing from how we talk about sustainability, teach it, practice it, ask others to live it. We have built sophisticated systems for communicating information about the crisis. We have not built the conditions for it to mean something — not to the people we need to act, not to the enterprises they work within, not to the systems those enterprises are part of. We have addressed the knowing. We have barely touched the caring. 

On an episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour that aired in 2023, Robin Wall Kimmerer — botanist, writer, and one of the clearest thinkers I've encountered on what it means to actually care for the world — described an exercise in which participants were asked to make two lists: "the things I love too much to lose," and then "what I am going to do about it." In her words, the first list was endless; the second insufficient. That gap — between endless love and insufficient action — is precisely what I am trying to understand and explore through this essay series. 

I'm not offering solutions here, at least not yet — this essay is the first in a series that I hope will help unpack the problem first, because I think the problem has been underdiagnosed and rushing past it is part of how we got here. What I am offering is a reframe. 

The gap between knowing and acting is not a knowledge gap. It is a meaning gap. And closing it will require something different than more data — it will require understanding what actually animates human commitment: the stories we inhabit, the identities we build through what we do, the sense that our actions connect us to something worth protecting, something worth becoming. 

That's what I want to explore here. Why does sustainability, for all its technical sophistication, still lack the animating force — a soul that would make people act on what they already know. And what it would take to give it one. 

Teresa Greenlees is a lifelong storyteller and meaning maker who teaches Marketing and Sustainable Business at Western Michigan University and founded Radical Brands, a strategy consultancy helping brands find and live their purpose. Soul of Sustainability is an ongoing essay series.