To those fully invested in conservation and environmental protection, it seems like a no-brainer: Explain what’s going on with planet Earth and people will take appropriate action to lessen their impact on this increasingly fragile place we call home.

Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a no-brainer when you’re dealing with the human mind.

That’s why an entirely new field of research has been on the rise the past couple of decades. It goes by various names, according to nuances of focus—conservation psychology, ecological psychology, environmental psychology—but the general objective is to gain understanding of the intersection of psychology and behavior so as to determine what it is that will motivate individuals to protect their environment.

Psychologist and researcher Renee Lertzman has dedicated her career to understanding this intersection, and as Earth Day approaches, she wants conservation organizations to understand why their go-to awareness campaign strategies may not be proving effective. It’s an especially salient consideration this year—as the government backs further away from environmental protections, it’s more important than ever that vested organizations motivate the public to embrace eco-sustainable habits. To that end, Lertzman teaches and consults with conservation organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund and the Center for Sustainable Energy, about how they might optimally get their message across to the public.

“We cannot separate an understanding of human psychology and psychological dimensions of both the causes of the problems and how we experience those issues,” she says.

Lertzman, wary of applying a label to her singular approach, refers to her work as “psycho-social studies and research.” Among her goals is drawing on the wisdom of clinical psychologists and psychotherapists to help organizations understand those emotions that get stirred up when people are confronted with distressing information. Lertzman believes such feelings are currently being overlooked in the field. “They’re very natural conflicts that come up when we learn about the impacts of our behavior and practices, especially in an industrial society,” she says, recalling a student from a class she taught on the psychology of climate change who first encountered the book100 Places to Go Before They Disappear. The student’s first reaction, Lertzman says, was “This is crazy!” Her next thought was that she had better get out and see those places—before it hit her that flying all over the world to visit endangered places only contributes to the problem.

This is a classic example of cognitive dissonance—the internal conflict of both knowing and not knowing what must be done—and Lertzman believes that recognizing and respecting it is key to unlocking the ambivalence that often prevents behavioral change.

“This is the dilemma most of us are in: I still want to travel; I still want to do the things I do; I don’t want to be part of the problem, so I feel kind of stuck,” Lertzman explains. “Part of you wants to make changes; part of you doesn’t want to. That’s the part the environmental community has not been tuned into.”

The problem, she says, is that when people start thinking about how they contribute to the problem of ecological degradation, they feel guilt and shame, often on an unconscious level. And as humans, we’re wired to avoid unpleasant feelings. “We see people avoiding taking responsibility,” Lertzman says, “because it’s a classic way that people engage in strategies to avoid feeling the stress and to avoid feeling powerless.”

Lertzman believes that the traditional messaging coming out of conservation organizations fails to address this. “There is an assumption that guilt and fear and shame are deeply motivating,” she says, when in reality, these emotions are somewhat traumatizing. In fact, she continues, new research in neuroscience suggests that experiencing guilt, fear, or anxiety at the moment we are learning something new causes a cognitive disruption—and that we are actually less able to pay attention and take in the new information.

“You want more people to be engaged. You want to actually be part of the solution, so you go around raising awareness,” she says. “You say, ‘If we only did this, we change X—how we get our food or how we get around…’ But what’s very common to come up around this is resistance.”

Lertzman hopes that before crafting awareness campaigns, more environmental organizations will start with the question, What is most likely to help disarm or soften our defense mechanisms? Then, she says, they can start working backward from there to craft their message.

“One of the most powerful things we can do is simply acknowledge the conflict very explicitly,” she says. For example, you might love taking road trips or eating hamburgers, or your family might have roots in a community with deep historical ties to a particular industry. “These things feel really sacred to who we are. We need to find creative ways of helping people safely get in touch with their concerns in a way that doesn’t feel like they are compromising their identity, affiliations, and allegiances."

“Of course, we love these things, there’s nothing wrong with that. But the next step would be to think about how to soften the guilt and shame—perhaps saying, ‘No one meant for this to happen. No one intended for this to happen. But here we are in this situation, and now we have the opportunity to imagine and create a different way of being that’s even better than before.’”

Modeling compassion for the mistakes humanity has made, and making room for people to process guilt and shame, could offer a way for conservation organizations to disarm the defense mechanisms that interfere with effective behavioral change. The research hasn’t gone far enough to guarantee such an approach would reap results, yet. But based on what we do know about the human mind, Lertzman says, “That’s the message we could be trying out.”