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Know thyself. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. One of those phrases is inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The other was probably inspired by a crappy blog post circa 2012. Both are relevant to today’s essay.

I’m writing this to reflect on what I’m learning from my seemingly failed attempts at talking about challenging issues with my students. I hate doing things badly, and I suspect I’m not alone in that.

A big part of The Next Right Thing is about communication skills informed by cognitive science findings on identity and cognitive dissonance. But my aim is not to pretend I’m an expert or that I always get things right. Indeed, I often realise that I’ve handled a conversation poorly. 

I’m going to describe a recent moment when sharing accurate but distressing information about an environmental issue backfired, and how a simple technique that emphasises action possibilities can help people remain curious by protecting their sense of agency.

Last week I saw a short video about a recent scandal involving PFAS, so-called forever chemicals, in France. The video highlighted how thousands of hectares of farmland in France have been contaminated with these harmful and long-lasting substances. Farmers have been left without a livelihood and discovered that their own bodies had been poisoned by the land they were tilling.

What is particularly disturbing about this is how it happened. It didn’t involve a chemical spill and it wasn’t an accident. For years farmers were given fertiliser provided by local industries such as paper mills, chemical plants and food processors. It was sold as affordable, high-quality compost. But it was in fact derived from industrial waste that contained high amounts of PFAS. What seemed like a win/win solution for industry and farming was in fact a way for industry to get rid of toxic waste by passing it off as harmless fertiliser in a process promoted as “agricultural recycling” (revalorisation agronomique). 

Shortly after seeing this eye-opening video I had my first class of the day, a group of second-year law students. With a surge of adrenaline, I told them about it. I assumed they would be as fascinated as I was. After all, last semester we studied environmental law and they had expressed some interest in the topic. Yet to my surprise, my students seemed indifferent. A few students glanced at their laptops. No one said anything. And as I probed them to see why they weren’t more concerned about the issue of PFAS, one student finally piped up and said, “You know, I love football. But if I always talk about Barça people will get bored.” He went on to suggest that their patience with me was wearing thin because I talk so much about the environment.

Let’s return to that wise injunction “know thyself”. What do we do when we realise that our love for an issue may not actually make us effective advocates for it? Here are my thoughts. First, I was lucky because that student I mentioned came to speak to me after class. We stood in the hall, where we spent the next twenty minutes sharing our views. 

He started out by telling me that it wasn’t that he didn’t care about the environment, he did. He told me about deep his love for sharks and his distress at the recent rollbacks of laws designed to protect their welfare. In other words, his indifference in class wasn’t indifference at all. What he didn’t like was the sense that the world was just a terrible place and that it was getting worse and there was nothing we could do about it. And me telling them about this news story landed as yet one more confirmation that the world is basically a bad place.

I am grateful to my student for that conversation. It reminded me not to jump to the conclusion that others don’t care about something just because they don’t express immediate enthusiasm. It also made me think of the idea of generative conflict, a term used by Adrienne Maree Brown in Emergent Strategy. That is, some conflicts are worth having even when they are uncomfortable in the moment because they bring about something valuable. 

The Next Right Thing GPT is trained on a handful of key thinkers, one of whom is Sarah Stein Lubrano. A key insight from her book Don’t Talk About Politics is that we are unlikely to change our beliefs or our behaviours if we don’t feel like we have agency. In other words, if we don’t feel that as individuals we can actually make a difference then all of the information in the world will be for nought. 

As I was reviewing how I presented that news story to my students a few things became clear. By asking my students what they thought they could do about the issue of PFAS, I was at a very high level of abstraction. Questions like “What can we do about this?” sound empowering, but they can actually be paralysing. The problem is enormous, the responsibility vague and as individuals we feel very small in comparison. It’s kind of like starting a debate about freedom of the will while staring at a pile of dirty laundry. It might be a fascinating question but you might regret it tomorrow when you’re rummaging through a pile of dirty socks. We aren’t looking for absolute truths but rather action possibilities. People rarely move from concern to action through information alone. They move when they can see a path forward, even a very small one.

It’s at this point that I remembered a very simple technique from Motivational Interviewing (MI). This is a widely-accepted approach that was originally used for helping people with substance abuse problems and is now used in different contexts where someone feels ambivalent about an issue. 

When working with someone considering sobriety you offer them a menu of options of experiences they could explore. They might include the following:

• Listen to a podcast episode about sobriety.
• Keep a record for one week of when and why you feel like drinking.
• Order a non-alcoholic drink the next time you go out socially.
• Research the recommended daily alcohol limits in your country.
• Calculate how much you spend per month on alcohol.

Notice how none of the options actually includes giving up alcohol. They are all low-stakes, short experiments. Importantly, you always leave a space for some of the client’s own ideas; the menu should always allow for personalisation. Also, it’s often presented in the form of a bubble sheet, that is, each option appears in its own little circle. This might seem insignificant, but I think this engages our visual system in a useful way. Each option appears like a little portal, a clear way forward. 

If I were to discuss this news story again, I wouldn’t ask “What do you think you can do about PFAS?” Instead, I would project on the board a menu of options asking which one the students would be willing to try in the next week.

• Read an article on one environmental issue (PFAS, plastics, soil loss, biodiversity, etc.) affecting your region.
• Ask someone you know what environmental issue they care most about.
• Follow one scientist or journalist working on environmental issues.
• Spend time in nature and reflect on what you value about it.
• Write down three questions you have about environmental problems.

And of course, I would leave a bubble blank for their own ideas.

As I was researching this piece I came across two developments that illustrate what I mean by action possibilities. Euronews recently reported on France’s ban on PFAS in clothing and cosmetics. And Euractiv covered a lawsuit brought by 192 claimants near Lyon seeking €36 million in damages from two chemical companies in what may be Europe’s largest civil case over PFAS contamination.

These examples matter not because they “balance out” the bad news, but because they show that responses are already underway. Legislators are regulating. Citizens are organising. Lawyers are bringing cases. Courts are being asked to adjudicate responsibility. These are not abstract solutions but roles people can step into. When we talk about difficult problems it helps to highlight these kinds of affordances, that is, visible opportunities for action. Without them people are left with the impression that nothing can be done, and as Sarah Stein Lubrano argues, people who lack a sense of agency are unlikely to change their beliefs or their behaviour.

Knowing ourselves and knowing one another means a shift in the way we communicate. When we tell others about important problems we need to embed action possibilities, especially when our audience might be disengaged. One simple way of doing this is by suggesting a menu of options, presented as short-term experiments. And don’t worry about doing it perfectly. Try a few small experiments. Sometimes the next right thing only becomes visible once we start looking for the action possibilities around us.

Sources

Disclose NGO — FAS: the manufacturer of sugar brand Daddy fosters forever chemicals

Disclose NGO — FAS : dix ans de négligences ont conduit à l’une des plus graves contaminations en France (in French) 

Euronews — France’s ban on ‘forever chemicals’ comes into force today. Here’s what will change 

Euractiv — FAS pollution: French citizens take on chemical giants  

Polycrisis. It’s the monster under the bed — terrifying, and strangely hard to see clearly. We sense it everywhere but struggle to describe it, which may be part of the problem. When something remains indistinct, it is easier to fear than to examine.

What if this tangle of crises is less a moral emergency than a riddle? Riddles do not demand panic; they demand attention. They reward patience and sustained curiosity. Even the bleakest topics can become energising when we approach them as problems to understand rather than verdicts to deliver.

What follows is an attempt to think through how to make that shift.

TNRT is partly about sharing information, but more importantly about learning to move deliberately between levels of abstraction. When we remain high up the ladder, we end up with sweeping moral narratives. When we move down, we encounter mechanisms — specific processes that can be examined and understood.

Consider the phrase “global warming.” It compresses an extraordinary range of chemical and biological dynamics into a single, deceptively gentle image of gradual temperature rise. “Warming” suggests comfort. It obscures the fact that roughly a quarter of atmospheric carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans, where it alters seawater chemistry and increases acidity. As pH levels shift, the largest habitat on Earth becomes less hospitable to calcifying organisms such as corals, shellfish and certain forms of plankton.

None of this is visible to the naked eye, which makes abstraction all the easier.

I learned this habit of moving down the ladder of abstraction from Nate Hagens’ work in ecological economics and systems thinking, which I began drawing on in my teaching several years ago. Hagens does not use the term itself — it comes from the linguist S.I. Hayakawa — but he practises it consistently, grounding large narratives in physical processes and material constraints.

Ocean acidification is one example of this move from abstraction toward material reality. Renewable energy offers another: solar panels, wind turbines and transmission lines are built from plastics, copper, concrete and steel. These materials are finite, energy-intensive to extract, and typically depend on fossil fuels somewhere along the supply chain.

This does not invalidate the case for renewable energy, but it does complicate it. When we pay close attention to the material inputs of a solar panel — the mined ores, the smelted metals, the global logistics — the abstraction begins to wear thin. We are no longer dealing with an ethereal adjective but with a material reality.

Abstraction casts a spell over us. It lulls us into believing that we live in a world of infinite raw materials. We don’t. 

Recognising limits is not the same as admitting defeat. It means paying attention to the ecological reality on which our economic and political systems depend. This shift in perspective is less daunting than it sounds. It begins by translating our systems from the abstract into the tangible.

Take inequality. At a high level it appears as a moral category — a statistic about the top one percent, a headline about widening gaps. It encourages outrage or resignation.

But move down a level and it begins to take on structure. Who owns the land in a given city? Who rents and who collects rent? What are the terms of tenancy law? How easy is it to raise rents, to evict, to convert housing into assets? What tax rules govern inherited property?

Inequality is not only a number; it is a pattern of ownership, a set of contracts, a web of incentives. Once you see that, the phenomenon shifts. It is no longer an abstract moral failure hovering above society. It is a system — built over time, maintained through policy, and therefore open, at least in principle, to revision.

When people make this move — from abstraction to structure — the questions change. I have seen this most clearly in my own teaching.

Nate Hagens’ work as an ecological economist has reshaped how I work with business and law students, who are trained to think in terms of interest rates, inflation, stock markets and other abstractions. Many of them have never been encouraged to consider that these financial systems rest on something more fundamental: the biosphere — what Hagens sometimes calls the real stock market. Watching them descend the ladder of abstraction and begin to see those foundations has been one of the most rewarding parts of my teaching career.

Not all of them end up sharing my enthusiasm for understanding our biophysical reality. (And yes, I intentionally didn’t use the word “environment”.) But a significant proportion of them do start asking different sorts of questions. Some start pointing out that if we take Hagens’ ideas to heart we’ll have to rethink entire areas of the economy.

In one class we ran a simulation and concluded that with sufficient global cooperation the world might function with roughly 150 million private vehicles — about a tenth of today’s total. Then a student raised her hand: what happens to the car manufacturers?

That question led to a realisation. We are not simply limited by political caution or incremental reform. We are working within a system that quietly rewards waste. What we celebrate as profit often depends on materials being used quickly, replaced frequently and discarded without much thought. Efficiency, in the ecological sense, can look like stagnation on a balance sheet. From this angle, profit and waste begin to look less like opposites and more like two sides of the same coin.

Once profit and waste are seen as structurally entwined, the conversation changes. The less we approach the climate crisis primarily as a moral indictment, the more seriously we are able to engage it as a systemic problem.

This is not because the ethical stakes are small — they are immense. It is because moral language can narrow our attention. We treat climate change as an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise sound system, rather than as one expression of deeper stresses within the very life-support structures on which that system depends.

We have become accustomed to speaking about the world through percentages, charts and growth curves. There is value in those abstractions. But when we stare only at the map, we risk forgetting the terrain.

The green transition, on paper, looks elegant — almost frictionless. Only when we look up do we see the copper, the silver and the other finite materials on which it depends. And then we are confronted with a simpler question: what does it mean to live well in a finite world?