The Central Role of Acceptance in Addressing the 6th Mass Extinction and Climate Change
Acceptance, as the foundational core process of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), is essential for enabling individuals and societies to confront and address the catastrophic challenges posed by the 6th Mass Extinction and climate change. The act of acceptance involves actively and openly embracing difficult thoughts, emotions, and sensations—including those related to environmental disaster—without resorting to avoidance, suppression, or denial. This process stands in powerful contrast to experiential avoidance, which is the instinctive, but ultimately maladaptive, tendency to turn away from pain and discomfort. Non-acceptance manifests at all levels of society when facing global ecological crisis: people may minimize or outright reject scientific evidence, ignore their own contributions to environmental harm, or disconnect emotionally from distressing realities.
This habitual avoidance serves as a psychological defense against the overwhelming distress evoked by climate change and mass extinction, yet it fundamentally undermines our collective ability to recognize the full scope of the crisis and to identify or implement meaningful solutions. Acceptance disrupts this barrier by creating psychological space to acknowledge the truth, feel the full weight of eco-anxiety, grief, and guilt, and remain present with these realities. This honest engagement with what is real is the necessary first step toward effective problem-solving, because solutions to complex crises cannot be found or enacted unless individuals and societies are willing to acknowledge—and sit with—the reality and causes of those crises.
How Non-Acceptance Blocks Problem Recognition and Solution-Finding
Non-acceptance of humanity’s destructive behavior is more than a personal struggle; it is a powerful collective force that has led to widespread denial and avoidance of environmental problems such as the 6th Mass Extinction and climate change. This persistent denial and rationalization—whether it takes the form of rejecting climate science, minimizing the anthropogenic causes of biodiversity loss, or simply looking away from unsettling news—creates a psychological filter that prevents people from fully recognizing the extent and urgency of the crisis.
As a result, people lose the capacity to perceive the scale and complexity of the problem and, consequently, are unable to generate or identify viable solutions. Denial and avoidance cut off creative engagement and inhibit collective action, producing a cycle in which the lack of acceptance accelerates destructive behaviors, which in turn deepen the level of psychological denial. The longer humanity fails to accept its role in precipitating biospheric collapse, the less likely it is to act purposefully to reverse course or create lasting change. This is why, in ACT, acceptance is emphasized from the outset—not as resignation or passivity, but as the courageous and necessary welcoming of harsh truths required to move forward constructively.
Acceptance as the Most Important Core Process in an Era of Global Crisis
Of all the ACT core processes, acceptance is arguably the most critical in the context of existential threats like the 6th Mass Extinction and climate change. Acceptance is not an endpoint but a catalyst, a “method of increasing values-based action” by allowing individuals and societies to be fully present with—even the most painful—internal experiences that arise in the face of global crisis. It is the antidote to the instinctive avoidance and denial that blocks awareness, values-clarification, and meaningful behavior change. Without acceptance, all other psychological processes and therapeutic interventions are rendered ineffective, because there is no willingness to honestly engage with what needs to change.
Acceptance enables people to experience emotional pain, guilt, grief, or helplessness about planetary decline without resorting to “psychological defenses” that merely reinforce avoidance. By staying with these emotions, individuals are able to witness and understand the urgency of the crisis and are empowered to make choices that align with their core values—choices that can lead to meaningful collective action. As such, acceptance is the essential gateway to psychological flexibility, the capacity to adapt to and persist through adversity in service of a greater good.
The Foundation of All Other ACT Core Processes
Acceptance is the cornerstone upon which the other five core processes of ACT—cognitive defusion, contact with the present moment, self as context, values clarification, and committed action—are conceptually and practically constructed. Each subsequent process presupposes or requires some willingness to accept reality as it is:
Cognitive Defusion: This process enables people to step back from and change their relationship with catastrophic or self-defeating thoughts (e.g., “It’s too late to save anything”), but cognitive defusion is only possible if individuals are willing to first accept the presence of these thoughts instead of suppressing or fighting them.
Contact with the Present Moment (Mindfulness): Mindful engagement with the here and now—necessary for effective action—is predicated on the acceptance of whatever thoughts, emotions, or sensations arise as people contact the reality of the environmental crisis.
Self as Context: Cultivating the “observing self” or “self-as-context” allows one to compassionately witness distressing experiences without being completely defined by them, a shift made possible through the embrace of acceptance.
Values Clarification: Authentic values exploration (e.g., love of nature, justice, stewardship) can only occur when people first accept the pain of ecological loss, thereby accessing the deeper layer of what truly matters to them.
Committed Action: Taking effective, value-aligned steps toward social or environmental healing often provokes discomfort, fear, or hopelessness, which individuals must accept in order to persist with meaningful behavior change.
Acceptance, therefore, is not simply the first process in a linear sequence, but the foundational context that enables all subsequent ACT work to occur.
Current Patterns of Destructive Behavior: Non-Acceptance as the Root Cause
Widespread patterns of human behavior—such as deforestation, resource depletion, overconsumption, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions—demonstrate a collective refusal to fully accept the reality and consequences of our actions. Society’s inclination to look away from environmental destruction is deeply linked with psychological denial, which, as research in psychoanalysis and climate psychology shows, is both individually and culturally reinforced. Denial mechanisms—whether in the form of outright negation (“This isn’t happening”), disavowal (“It’s not such a big problem”), or motivated reasoning (“Technology will fix this”)—insulate individuals from the painful reality of planetary decline, but also perpetuate destructive behaviors.
As the ecological crisis accelerates, denial can become even more entrenched, creating an exponential feedback loop: the greater the harm to the environment, the more overwhelming the reality, and the more strongly individuals and societies seek refuge in denial or disconnection. This avoidance results in a “paralyzing fog of doubt” and policy inaction that harm both the environment and human communities. Breaking this cycle—where non-acceptance produces deeper denial and accelerating destruction—requires a fundamental cultural and psychological shift toward acceptance.
Breaking the Cycle: The Importance of Learning to Accept and Commit
Breaking the denial-avoidance-destruction cycle is therefore paramount for sustainable action on the 6th Mass Extinction and climate change. The cultivation of acceptance is an active process: it means learning as individuals, communities, and societies to face reality, welcome difficult feelings and facts, and “drop the struggle” with internal resistance or guilt, enabling people to see themselves as capable contributors to change. Acceptance redirects energy away from futile struggle or disengagement and toward constructive engagement with solutions.
Once acceptance has cleared the ground, the process of values clarification and committed action can proceed: people can reconnect with what they care most deeply about (e.g., future generations, the intrinsic worth of nature), and commit—even in the presence of fear, sadness, or grief—to behaviors and policies that restore and protect the biosphere. This is not simply a matter of individual psychology but an urgent collective necessity; the scale of planetary healing required now demands psychological flexibility, persistence, and a willingness to act in the face of uncertainty and distress.
Conclusion: Acceptance and Commitment as the Path to Ecological Resilience
In summary, acceptance is the critical first step in ACT and in humanity’s response to global crisis, because it allows us to face, rather than avoid, the realities that must be changed. All other processes of psychological and social resilience depend on the groundwork that acceptance lays. The current exponential trajectory of environmental harm is a direct reflection of collective non-acceptance—of reality, responsibility, and emotion—which in turn causes deeper denial and escalating destruction.
Breaking this destructive cycle requires that humanity, individually and collectively, learn to accept reality and commit to values-driven action—by openly embracing discomfort, bearing witness to the truth, and persisting in creative engagement with the existential challenges before us. Only through acceptance and commitment can we hope to halt, reverse, and heal the catastrophic patterns now threatening the web of life on Earth.
