Book Review: Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life

Abstract

There is a fundamental puzzle at the heart of the contemporary encounter with the implications of climate change. It concerns the nature of human perception and the confluence of psychological, social, political, economic, and ecological forces constituting what we call "behavior." In recent years, the literature concerning "behavior change" in relation to mitigation and adaptation practices in the face of climate change has exploded. It tends to focus on the individual and takes a rationalist, cognitive approach-measuring and assessing what people say in relation to what they actually do (Kollmus & Agyeman, 2002).It seems, regardless of one's disciplinary background, scholars, journalists, and researchers of many stripes are weighing in on the psychological dimensions of climate change-and all are in desperate search for the right combination of incentives, pressures, structures, and practices that will unlock what appears as stubborn resistance to facing reality. This (often perplexing) refusal to confront and creatively engage with the consequences of a carbon-heavy global economic system is also commonly referred to as climate denial-a term increasingly bandied around as a viable descriptor of inaction (Gore, 2011;Krugman, 2011;Marshall, 2009). Rarely addressed in such analyses is a consideration of how subjectivity, social constructions, and the nuanced, complex interplay between social and psychic worlds that inform how we behave.Kari Norgaard's book, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life, is a refreshing, lucid, and much-needed analysis that defies easy categorization between the psychic, social, and geographic domains. Living in Denial, based on Norgaard's doctoral research, is a thoughtful study of the social processes of climate denial, during a particularly warm winter in a Norwegian village. Her book could easily read as a whodunit, as she begins with her arrival in Norway, and a growing realization that all was not quite right. She noticed with sociological acuity a curious "double speak" between what people were saying about the unusually warm winter (and climate change implications) and the lack of any real mobilization to address the problems. This led her to formulate a new set of questions than what she arrived with, and as an investigator, she leads us through her inquiry to find out what may be taking place. The result effectively reframes, complicates, and problematizes how we conceptualize climate denial.A third-generation Norwegian American, Norgaard sets her story in the village of Bygdaby (a fictional name) in Norway. Why this place? As Norgaard writes, "Bygdaby and Norway are important precisely because people there are so sincere in their concerns for the wider world and engaged in so much political activity on its behalf" (p. i). The site and its cultural, ecological, political, and social attributes set up a rich case study, setting in stark relief the contradictions, paradoxes, and tensions attending climate change.Norgaard's investigative tack was informed by ...