Agency and Ambiguity: What Remains Possible in Times of Change
Last week I was invited to give a keynote address to the staff of Northlands College in La Ronge, Saskatchewan. It had been decades since I was last that far north in my province, and the mind tends to forget what that kind of remoteness feels like in the body. The trip was punctuated with moments of profound beauty followed by deep sadness. On the drive, the autumn larches glistened in the sun along that first lonely stretch from Prince Albert National Park northward. But soon, golden needles turned to charred remnants of the 2025 fire season. And while I knew the forest burned that summer—I felt it in my lungs and the heaviness in my chest; I volunteered to make meals for displaced evacuees—seeing some small part of the massive scale of what's been lost left me breathless once again.
La Ronge offered another difficult juxtaposition. The extraordinary beauty of the northern landscape, with its stillness, glass lakes, treed islands, and crows, formed a backdrop to the visible struggles of people living with addiction and other forms of hardship. These struggles cannot be understood apart from the broader histories of colonialism and intergenerational trauma that continue to shape life in northern communities. The palpable loneliness I encountered, set against what is also a close-knit community, stays with me, particularly as I reflect on the questions I had come north to discuss with educators, administrators, and staff supporting northern students.
My keynote was on meaningful work in times of change, followed by a workshop on building communities that sustain us. Both sessions were concerned with human agency—our capacity to act within circumstances we have not necessarily chosen, and the ways our relationships influence what becomes possible. One of the ideas I introduced came from philosopher Hanna Pickard, whose work on responsibility without blame offers an interesting way of thinking about agency, compassion, and accountability. Although Pickard developed this approach in relation to mental health challenges, particularly personality disorders and addiction, I wonder whether it might help us think about responsibility in other contexts, including our responses to the climate crisis.
Responsibility Without Blame
Pickard's work begins with a difficulty encountered in clinical practice. Supporting someone through addiction or other psychological difficulties often involves helping them acknowledge responsibility for actions that have caused harm to themselves or others. Yet blame, particularly when accompanied by hostility, contempt, or condemnation, can interfere with the very capacities for reflection and change that treatment seeks to support. Pickard distinguishes responsibility and blameworthiness from what she calls affective blame, which involves negative emotional responses that we feel entitled to direct toward someone we judge responsible for wrongdoing. We can recognize harm, expect accountability, and establish appropriate consequences without adopting those hostile attitudes (Pickard, 2011).
But responsibility without blame is not only a question of how we regard others. It also matters how we understand our own actions, particularly when we recognize that we have caused harm or fallen short of our commitments. Acknowledging responsibility can be painful, and it may bring guilt, shame, or self-blame. Pickard recognizes these difficulties in the process of therapeutic change (2011). We might think here of the blame-shame spiral that can accompany addiction, in which shame about one's behaviour becomes another source of distress, potentially contributing to the very patterns one is struggling to change. There is an important difference between acknowledging something we have done and allowing that action to become a condemnation of who we are. If responsibility is to support agency, rather than diminish it, we need to be able to recognize our actions and their consequences while remaining open to the possibility of acting differently.
Our circumstances matter here, too. Pickard emphasizes the importance of understanding people's histories, including experiences of trauma, deprivation, and disadvantage, without assuming that these circumstances necessarily eliminate responsibility (2011, 2017). Compassion need not require us to deny someone's capacity to make choices, just as recognizing that capacity need not require us to disregard the conditions that constrain it. I think this applies to how we understand ourselves as much as to how we respond to others. We can acknowledge the limitations imposed by our histories and circumstances without reducing ourselves to those limitations. And because agency is exercised within relationships, the ways we respond to one another can either strengthen or diminish our capacity to take responsibility and participate in change.
Responsibility and the Climate Crisis
There is an enormous amount of blame circulating in public conversations about climate change. I hear all the time that “they” clearly don't care, or questions about “what's wrong with them?” We blame governments for failing to act, corporations for continuing destructive practices, previous generations for the conditions we have inherited, and one another for our consumption habits and everyday choices. We also turn that blame inward, questioning whether we are doing enough or whether our actions are consistent with our values. These are not trivial concerns. The causes of climate change are not equally distributed, and neither are the capacities to influence what happens next. Governments, industries, institutions, and individuals occupy very different positions in relation to both the causes of the crisis and the possibilities for responding to it.
I don't think we should shy away from questions of responsibility. But Pickard's work invites us to consider whether blame, particularly in its more hostile and condemnatory forms, helps us respond to those responsibilities. When we anticipate judgment from others, or become preoccupied with condemning ourselves, we may find it difficult to acknowledge uncertainty, contradiction, or the limits of our understanding. We may hesitate to speak about the ways our actions fall short of our commitments, or the difficulties we encounter in trying to live in alignment with our values. Yet these are precisely the conversations that might help us better understand our responsibilities and what we can do. Responsibility without blame does not mean abandoning criticism or accountability. It asks us to consider how we might acknowledge wrongdoing, including our own, without allowing condemnation to foreclose the possibility of change.
There is a connection here with Simone de Beauvoir's understanding of situated freedom. For Beauvoir, we exercise freedom within circumstances that precede us and that we have not necessarily chosen. Our histories, relationships, resources, and social conditions influence what becomes possible, sometimes profoundly. But acknowledging those constraints does not require us to regard ourselves as powerless. This seems particularly relevant to the climate crisis, where the scale of the problem can make individual agency feel almost insignificant. We cannot determine the outcome through our individual actions, but neither does that mean we are without influence. We cooperate, disagree, negotiate, organize, and participate in collective efforts whose outcomes we cannot guarantee. Our relationships with one another can expand or constrain those possibilities.
This is one of the reasons I began facilitating Climate Cafés. A Climate Café offers an opportunity to come together and talk openly about our emotional responses to climate change and the wider environmental crisis. It is not a therapy group or a debate, and there is no expectation that participants arrive with particular knowledge, political commitments, or ideas about what should be done. There is also no expectation that anyone leave feeling more hopeful or optimistic. What matters is the opportunity to have conversations that can be difficult to find room for elsewhere. We may be grieving changes to places we love, frightened by what the future might hold, angry about political inaction, or struggling with contradictions between our values and the circumstances of our lives. We may also experience gratitude, affection, and a deep attachment to the natural world, sometimes alongside profound sadness about its vulnerability.
I don't think we need to know in advance what might emerge when people come together in this way. Listening to someone else's perspective may challenge our assumptions, reveal circumstances we had not considered, or help us articulate something we have struggled to understand ourselves. These encounters can influence how we understand our responsibilities and what becomes possible through our relationships.
During the workshop at Northlands, I asked participants to consider a question beyond our time together: What do we make possible for one another? It is a question worth considering in relation to the climate crisis, particularly when so much of what we face seems beyond our individual influence. Our relationships shape our circumstances, and those relationships are continually shaped by what we say and do.
Our next Climate Café is free and open to anyone who would like to participate. There is no need to arrive with answers or even a clear understanding of what you want to say. The invitation is to come together and make room for the experiences, perspectives, and questions that arise as we try to understand our place in a changing world.
References
Pickard, H. (2011). Responsibility without blame: Empathy and the effective treatment of personality disorder. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 18(3), 209–223.
Pickard, H. (2017). Responsibility without blame for addiction. Neuroethics, 10, 169–180.
Books to Explore
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2013). Milkweed Editions.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). Citadel Press.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958). University of Chicago Press.
Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006). Harvard University Press.
Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2004). Nation Books.
