The Eradicating Ecocide website carries an appeal for a modern day Charles Grant to come forward. Grant was an 18th century chairman of the British East India Company and a vocal opponent of slavery. The Eradicating Ecocide campaign calls for ecocide – the extensive destruction of ecosystems – to be recognised in international law as the fifth crime against Peace. Lawyer Polly Higgins' compelling argument is that the abolition of ecocide requires business leadership as surely as the campaign for the abolition of slavery did.

So far there appear to be no takers for the Charles Grant role. It's a tough call. Individual business leaders could find themselves in the dock if Higgins' campaign bears fruit. You need look no further than the expressions on the faces of the actors who played the accused CEOs in the Hamilton group's mock ecocide trial to know that this is a place that no business leader would wish to be.

At the time when Higgins first launched the eradicating ecocide campaign, I found myself at a networking event chatting to a couple of big cheeses from multi-national companies. What a great idea, I enthused. Wouldn't this create just the level playing field you need? Wouldn't this get you off the hook with your shareholders and allow you to pursue sustainability in a big way? I was told in no uncertain terms that this was probably the lousiest idea they had heard all day. Not just that, but these guys were angry and indignant, retreating rapidly into accusations that I was naïve and that this law would strangle innovation, discourage leadership, raise prices, destroy competitiveness – you name it, I heard it.

If I'd been chatting to a director of Shell or Texaco I could have understood this, but these were the good guys. We were at an event about sustainability and their companies were way out ahead. Higgins' arguments did not attack business but argued for conditions in which they could flourish – albeit in a different way. Why the knee-jerk response and reversion to caricature big, bad businessman? Psychologically, I think I'd just done the equivalent of issuing an arrest warrant. These men were personally wounded by the idea that they might be caught up in something that could be thought of as a crime and they wanted to show me that they would defend honour, livelihood and reputation to the end. Perhaps at some deeper level they were afraid.

One of the paradoxes for environmental campaigners in developed nations is that we are often fighting for the rights of others – for other species, people in other nations, people not yet born. Like the abolitionists we may not personally benefit from our victories and indeed may be disadvantaged in the short-term. This produces a complex moral and psychological field to work in, one that frequently produces unintended consequences like my conversation with the business leaders. Angry denial, studied indifference and projection of blame are just a few of the responses that leave campaigners shell-shocked and puzzled as they struggle to engage both the public and the powerful in the struggle for a truly sustainable future.

A new organisation, the Climate Psychology Alliance, has been set up to try to bring insights from a variety of psychological perspectives into difficulties like these. It holds its first public conference – Psyche, Law and Justice on 16 March in London. Higgins is the keynote speaker and the respondents are psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe and eco-psychologist Sandra White.

Is there a modern-day Charles Grant out there somewhere? My fantasy is that they are reading this, and they will come to this event and Eradicating Ecocide will get the business champion it needs.

Rosemary, known as 'Ro', Randall is a psychotherapist who researchs climate change

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