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

by Kari Marie Norgaard

An analysis of why people with knowledge about climate change often fail to translate that knowledge into action. Global warming is the most significant environmental issue of our time, yet public response in Western nations has been meager. Why have so few taken any action? In Living in Denial , sociologist Kari Norgaard searches for answers to this question, drawing on interviews and ethnographic data from her study of "Bygdaby," the fictional name of an actual rural community in western Norway, during the unusually warm winter of 2000-2001. In 2000-2001 the first snowfall came to Bygdaby two months later than usual; ice fishing was impossible; and the ski industry had to invest substantially in artificial snow-making. Stories in local and national newspapers linked the warm winter explicitly to global warming. Yet residents did not write letters to the editor, pressure politicians, or cut down on use of fossil fuels. Norgaard attributes this lack of response to the phenomenon of socially organized denial, by which information about climate science is known in the abstract but disconnected from political, social, and private life, and sees this as emblematic of how citizens of industrialized countries are responding to global warming. Norgaard finds that for the highly educated and politically savvy residents of Bygdaby, global warming was both common knowledge and unimaginable. Norgaard traces this denial through multiple levels, from emotions to cultural norms to political economy. Her report from Bygdaby, supplemented by comparisons throughout the book to the United States, tells a larger story behind our paralysis in the face of today's alarming predictions from climate scientists.

Genres: Environment, Nonfiction, Climate Change, Psychology, Sociology, Science, Nature

301 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2011

Reviews

[Andrea McDowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about everything.

Technically, yes, it's a book about how people deny climate change; but the theoretical lenses in it are useful for just about any issue you might choose. There were mind fireworks going off all over the place for me--seeing how, on one point, what the author discusses perfectly describes and explains something I have seen over and over again on climate change actions, and how at the same time it applies to other social movements from feminism to LGBT and class issues, as well as personal- and family-level issues like addictions and mental health.

Normally, I read books on climate change very, very carefully.

I allocate daily page quotas, don't allow myself to read them too close to bed (or I won't sleep), maybe manage the emotional fallout with a glass of wine and/or half a box of kleenex. Not this one. This one, I want to bronze, except then I couldn't reread it.

While Norgaard does touch on the issue of organized climate denial a la the Koch brothers and Exxon, it is mostly about the small-scale, community and individual denials we undertake to manage our emotional responses.

After all, she asks--even in the United States, a majority of people say they believe the climate is changing and that this is a serious issue. And yet even these people are not acting. Why?

The disconnect, Norgaard argues, is that people feel so scared, guilty and helpless, that they turn to emotion-management strategies instead of political or social action. These are described in some detail--in some cases, repetitive detail. But it is convincing and certainly fits my own professional and volunteer experiences.

Much of denial, she argues, is socially mediated and organized: we have created societies where talking about climate change (along with a host of other issues) is considered rude in many contexts, unless it's in the form of a joke. Coincidentally, the Fort McMurray wildfire took place right when I read the book, and I saw this play out in my own country in real time: here we have the Canadian municipal symbol of climate change, burning in a wildfire that is a perfect example of climate change impacts ... and no one mentioned climate change. The one politician who finally did (Elizabeth May) was promptly excoriated by the Prime Minister and the NDP leader, and had to backtrack.

It also serves to reinforce and protect global privilege. The wealthy residents of first world nations, through denial, can reinforce and protect their (our) destructive lifestyles while reassuring themselves that they are good people with good intentions who don't mean to kill people. Which is pretty much identical to every other form of privilege and the types of denial that protect them.

Incidentally, I found it fascinating (and simultaneously crushing) how identical the processes of denial Norgaard identifies and describes are to the very techniques psychologists recommend to deal with mental health disorders: i.e., using thought to manage feelings. With alcoholism, people and families unhealthily decide what to pay attention to and what to ignore to act as if it is not destroying their lives; with climate change (and sexism, racism, classism, etc.) people and societies decide what to pay attention to and what to ignore to manage collective feelings of guilt, anger, helplessness, and fear of loss; with depression and anxiety, individuals are actively taught by mental health professionals to decide what to pay attention to and what to ignore in order to facilitate daily functioning. That is depressing as shit. And not a coincidence, I am sure.

Norgaard offers no hope, which is consistent with her research--only a vague idea that if we start working on climate change locally, people may make these connections and feel empowered enough that they can deal with the guilt, powerlessness and fear through more constructive means. This is a possibility, and one I think every environmental and climate campaigner/activist hopes is true, but has so far proven not to be. Personally, I wonder how we could make the public expression of guilt, fear and powerlessness socially acceptable enough to have the conversations and experiences that we are so terrified of having, and see what comes of that.

If denial on this scale is basically a culture-wide reproduction of the same kind of process that allows, for example, a wife in Austria to remain ignorant of her husband keeping their daughter locked in a secret room in the basement so he can rape her for 18 years, or a husband to not notice his wife's abuse of their children and inability to control her spending, then one might consider using similar techniques as work in those contexts.

1) You can't convince everyone. Eventually they might be confronted with evidence so overwhelming that they can no longer continue denying reality. (Say, if your husband is arrested and charged with incest and the children who randomly showed up on your doorstep are genetically proven to be the offspring of your husband and daughter.) And eventually, maybe not. So instead of trying to convince everyone of the reality of climate change (which, as Norgaard takes some pains to describe, actually backfires because increasing levels of awareness and scientific knowledge on this issue are inversely correlated with levels of concern and willingness to act), allow people who are determined not to know better, not to know better--unless you need them.

2) You can convince some people. There is no way to do this painlessly. Break down the fucking denial with a god-damned hatchet. It is not going to be comfortable. There will be grief, rage, depression, mourning, and terror; these are unpleasant experiences, but not fatal. Stop trying to protect people from feeling terrible about a terrible situation.

3) Regroup, and talk to the people who are willing to listen and talk back about what can be done.

What Norgaard proposes is the climate equivalent of the family of an alcoholic trying to deal with the alcoholism by discussing the financial issues with a debt-management specialist, and hoping that eventually this translates into a willingness to confront the drinking. I've never seen this work. What happens, in my experience, is that denial works for years or decades and everything ticks along swimmingly with disaster under the surface, until someone goes under all at once and almost drowns in it, and then learns to swim, and then recovers. "Feeling terrible" is inevitable and, in some cases, never goes away.

So my personal takeaway is this:

Be as socially inappropriate about climate change as you can handle.

Feel like shit about it. Be as angry, guilty, scared, and powerless as you really are, when you let yourself think about it. Don't cover it up when you talk to people. Don't make it a joke. Bring it up when you know you're not supposed to. Make people uncomfortable. Be uncomfortable. When you find people who are willing to go there with you, talk to them more, get together, make plans.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate this book for introducing me to the concept of implicatory denial - not outright disputing facts or using euphemisms to lessen the blow of those facts but instead knowing and believing the facts but failing to consider "the psychological, political or moral implications that conventionally follow” those facts. Norgaard gives many, many examples of the sorts of dead ends she reaches when trying to discuss climate change with the residents of Bygdaby:

"People gave an initial reaction of concern, and then we hit a dead zone where there was suddenly not much to be said, “nothing to talk about.” From the things they said (e.g., “it’s depressing,” “not sure what to do”), I had the distinct sense that it was an issue that people were uncomfortable discussing

This definitely reflects my anecdotal experiences. Norgaard goes in depth explaining how apathy takes work to create - and that apathy can in fact plague people who are otherwise very empathetic when they feel a problem is just too overwhelming and unstoppable. She explains how dominant social structures discourage challenging the status quo and that tackling climate change would require toppling nearly every status quo on the planet.

While I liked these points, this really is more of an academic paper than a book. It's not a light or breezy read and I found myself fighting the urge to skip pages or entire chapters. Compared to a book like The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh which looks at (other) reasons for the lack of serious considerations of climate change but manages to be entertaining and captivating throughout the process.

I would not recommend reading this book unless you are doing research related to this field, but I do think it has some valuable insights. The cliffnotes you see in this review and others should lay out all the most salient points.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant. When I was in grad school for environmental science, I remember feeling frustrated that we covered the climate science, but we didn't talk about the social side of it. What I mean by that is it doesn't matter what the physical science says if the social science can't tell us why people don't accept it. I wish we had read this book.

While this book focuses largely on a small community in Norway, the information is relevant to everywhere and everyone. Norgaard did a phenomenal job with the research, as well as connecting that research to her study in Norway. She covers the US quite a bit as well. It has every bit of sociological and psychological explanations for denial that I wish I had access to during grad school. You truly cannot understand climate science until you read this book.

[André Habet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is devastating and wonderful. Norgaard uses her white American privilege to research-up on a small Norweigan community to see how they respond to climate change. Her findings show how as a society people work to create emotional norms that push away ill feelings brought on by climate change, and their complicity in it. Does a great job of disrupting the narrative of the simple, Scandinavian and with compassion illustrates just how deep the problems of climate denial are. I am shaken by this book, and worried for us all, but also grateful that Norgaard did this.

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would characterize this as a touchstone or modern classic in environmental studies and sociology. Norgaard's argument about the social organization of denial in relationship to climate change mobilization and social transformations is more than apt - it is is insightful, patient, and endlessly generous. These are crucial features of a diagnosis of what could otherwise be called the modern death drive of social organizations, insofar as the structures that forestall action on climate change make a continued good life on planet Earth increasingly unlikely for an increasingly high number of persons now and in the future.

[Serena]

I read this for work

[Ben Thurley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kari Norgaard, an American sociologist of Norwegian descent, sets out to answer a few key questions about social responses (or lack of response) to the challenge of climate change.

How are the citizens of wealthy industrialized nations responding to global warming? Why are so few people taking any sort of action? Why do some social and environmental problems result in people’s rising up when others do not? And given that many people do know the grim facts, how do they manage to produce an everyday reality in which this urgent social and ecological problem is invisible?

A quick word about the word "denial" in the title is in order. Norgaard is not addressing the mainly Anglosphere (US, Canada, UK and Australia) phenomenon of rejection of mainstream climate science, what she – following Stanley Cohen – refers to as "literal" denial: the assertion that global warming isn't happening or that climate change isn't real. Rather, she is addressing the more vexed social phenomenon whereby people who are relatively well-informed about global warming and express some level of concern minimise "the psychological, political or moral implications" of these views – what Cohen refers to as "implicatory" denial.

Essentially, Norgaard argues that a process of socially organised denial allows individuals to "collectively distance themselves from information because of norms of emotion, conversation, and attention and by which they use an existing cultural repertoire of strategies" such as shared construals of time and space, nearness and distance, the selectivity of communal perspectives, as well as local and national myths and stories.

The work is built around field study and interviews Norgaard conducted over the course of a year in a Norwegian town which is lightly fictionalised as "Bygdaby", after an unusually warm winter in which snowfall was at record lows and lakes failed to freeze, causing significant economic and social disruption. However, it is clear that Norgaard's findings are relevant far beyond the town, or even the boundaries of Norway, and in the later stages of the book she directly addresses her findings to the situation in the US.

This is a sociologically rich work that rewards careful reading and reflection. It places no moral opprobrium on the "denial" about climate change she finds present in local and national discourse, viewing much of it – rather – as a sort of survival mechanism (counterproductive though it may be) against troubling emotions such as guilt, powerlessness or threats to individual and collective senses of identity. She develops a psychology and sociology of emotions that is really interesting and her framing (following the work of Nina Eliasoph) of apathy as an actively constructed social response (rather than passive or default position) is striking.

Through a framework of socially organized denial, our view shifts from one in which understanding of climate change and caring about ecological conditions and our human neighbors are in short supply to one whereby these qualities are acutely present but actively muted in order to protect individual identity and sense of empowerment and to maintained culturally produced conceptions of reality.

The best part of a very good book for me was that Norgaard is clear on both what is at stake and what is involved in beginning the process of breaking down this socially constructed denial:

Working together may over time create the supportive community that is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for people to face large fears about the future. Engagement in such activities may also serve an important strategy of providing hopeful action...

It will not be easy to overcome feelings of despair and ineffectiveness, to figure out how to communicate with neighbors across political differences, or to translate meaningfully the global into the local and vice versa. There is no guarantee that any of it will work. Facing climate change will not be easy. But it is worth trying.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few passages from Living in Denial:



This state of affairs brings to mind the work of historical psychologist Robert J. Lifton. Lifton’s research on Hiroshima survivors describes people in states of shock, unable to respond rationally to the world around them. He calls this condition “psychic numbing.” Following his initial studies in Japan, much of Lifton’s work has been devoted to describing the effect of nuclear weapons on human psychology, particularly for Americans (see, for example, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial). Out of this project, Lifton describes people today as living in an “age of numbing” due to their awareness of the possibility of extinction (from the presence of both nuclear weapons and the capacity for environmental degradation). In this usage, numbing comes not from a traumatic event, but from a crisis of meaning. Lifton says that all of us who live in the nuclear age experience some degree of psychic numbing. We know that our lives can end at any moment, yet we live as though we do not know this. Lifton calls this condition the “absurdity of the double life.” We live with “the knowledge on the one hand that we, each of us, could be consumed in a moment together with everyone and everything we have touched or loved, and on the other our tendency to go about business as usual – continue with our routines as though no such threat existed.” According to Lifton, the absurdity of the double life profoundly affects our thinking, feeling, identity, sense of empowerment, political imagination, and morality. He writes, “If at any moment nothing might matter, who is to say that nothing matters now?”



In her landmark book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling sociologist Arlie Hochschild vividly exposes the relationship of seemingly private and personal emotions to social structure and political economy. She writes about the signal function of emotions and their ability to provide information about our interpretations of the world. Quite provocatively and in contrast to the emotion/reason dualism, she writes that emotion “can tell us about a way of seeing” and that “emotion is unique among the senses because it is related to cognition.” She goes on to explain: “A black person may see the deprivation of the ghetto more accurately, more ‘rationally’ through indignation and anger than through obedience or resigned ‘realism.’ He will focus clearly on the policeman’s bloodied club, the landlord’s Cadillac, the look of disapproval on the employment agencies’ white face. Outside of anger these images become like boulders on a mountainside, miniscule parts of the landscape.” Hochschild writes that “a person totally without emotion has no warning system, no guidelines to the self-relevance of a sight, a memory or a fantasy. Like one who cannot touch fire, the emotionless person suffers a sense of arbitrariness, which from the point of view of his or her self-interest is irrational. In fact, emotion is a potential avenue to ‘the reasonable view.’” Sociologists of emotion also emphasize the role emotions play in the sociological imagination: “Emotions provide the ‘missing link’ between ‘personal troubles’ and broader ‘public issues’ of social structure, itself the defining hallmark of the sociological imagination.” Thus, Hochschild notes, “When we do not feel emotion, or disclaim emotion, we lose touch with how we link inner to outer reality.”



Citizens of wealthy nations who fail to respond to the issue of climate change benefit from their denial in economic terms. They also benefit by avoiding the emotional and psychological entanglement and identity conflicts that may arise from knowing that one is doing the “wrong thing.”



…global warming as an issue about which people care and have considerable information, but one about which they don’t really want to know and in some sense don’t know how to know.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book almost feels like a journal of ethnographic studies. The feeling of being in a foreign country slowly fades away, thanks in part to the numerous explanations of local customs in Denmark and in part to the parallels with any other "Western" country.
Bottom line: Kari Marie Norgaard masterfully explains the denial taking place. We're rushing toward the wall, and most of us are enjoying the trip...

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is unbelievable. Extraordinary. Powerful. If you want to know why Trump happened (again), why Brexit continues, why Andrew Tate, why Jordan Peterson - this is the book.

It is not what I expected. I was reading this book for my project on the information deficit, and how individualized emotions summon overconfidence and a denial of expertise. Published in 2011, I was being completist in my reading.

Instead, this book is a masterwork on how 'we' continue to maintain comfort and a centred sense of self, while all the actual information and research demonstrates how we are living is not sustainable, appropriate or - indeed - valuable. Yes, the focus is climate science. But the wider argument about how our emotions allow us to live in denial and delusion is a frame to understand our world. And our place in it.

Once more, the research is available to show what is going wrong. Once more, we elect and appoint people who should not be allowed to go to the toilet without assistance. This book explains why...

[Jan Bloxham · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid contribution in the ever-growing swath of work trying to figure out why we are afopying such a catastrophic maladaptive strategy re climate change.

I found the language erring the academic side, ie needlessly longwinded and complex. The documented chats intersperced thruout were an odd juxtaposition to it. (Also, the translations from Norwegian seem s little off, but one gets the gist).

There were some strong passages here and there, but I found myself impatiently waiting for the next one a bit too often.

The long list of references provided can lead you much deeper into the works of the giants upon which Kari stands.

I’d recommend looking at more up-to-date chats if one is interested in observing how people think, feel and talk today.

I’d also recommend ‘Don’t Even Think About It’ (George Marshall, 2014), as I found it much more effectively written, every paragraph full of significance.

[Indigo bear · Rating 5 out of 5]

Through her case study of a town in Norway, Norgaard provides specific details about what that inaction looks like and how people think in relation to that inaction—so the book moves between descriptions of sociological ideas and the quotes she collected and events she observed in Norway.

Norway was selected because it is far north, and thus the effects of global warming are more visible. Norwegians are among the most educated in the world, so most Norwegians know about global warming, even if they do not do much about it. Norway is also ideal because the exploitation of fossil fuels (particularly oil) is the basis upon which Norway's wealth/high standard of living has been (and continues to be) built. So even if Norwegians want to do something about global warming, they clearly see that their standard of living is based upon causing global warming—quite a conundrum! These three aspects of Norway made it a well-selected case site for the project.

In terms of theory, she uses Ann Swidler's toolkit model of the role of culture in action (e.g., as described in Swidler's book, Talk of Love, and in a famous journal article published in 1986 called "Culture in action: Symbols and strategies"), supplemented by Zerubavel's ideas related to thought communities (e.g., in his book, Social Mindscapes) and ideas about power (e.g., Antonio Gramsci's idea of "hegemony"). I appreciated her explicit alliance with Swidler's influential theory of action and how she complemented Swidler's theory with an understanding of Zerubavel's ideas. I also appreciated her equally explicit decision to use hegemony and related ideas about power to understand social order. Norgaard doesn't give much justification for why these theories are the best ones to use in this situation, other than to imply that the theories fit the data, but we always see that in sociological studies. I would have appreciated more of an explicit set of reasons for why we might want to think in terms of these particular theories. But I am sympathetic to the approach (particularly the focus on power in her theory of order). It is also useful to see a theory that uses Swidler/Zerubavel and how this connects up to theories of hegemony—to my knowledge, no other environmental-sociological book makes such a clear link between Swidler/Zerubavel's ideas and theories of how power affects culture and action.

[L · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's in many ways shocking that an ethnographic study from a small rural community in Norway done in the years 2000-2001 would still resonate so much in 2025, but that is where we are, and I'm glad I discovered the book, if only for giving me the vocabulary for my own experiences as well as the experiences of people around me. One cannot break out of the "double life" without first recognising it as such; though we speak much more openly about the guilt and helplessness nowadays than we did 20 years ago, its hold on us is no less strong. But we are not the simple victims we like to think of ourselves as, and perhaps recognising that we are complicit in the production of our own denial can empower us to break out of it.

[Mathew Toll · Rating 5 out of 5]

This books is groundbreaking. When we talk about why people don't believe in climate change we tend to think of about the countermovement and literal denial of the fact of climate change. This book is about the much deeper problem of our more insidious implicatory denial of climate change. Acting as if it weren't true and not fulling contending with it in ourselves and in our actions.

[Rebecca]

Not what I expected. Almost like a sociological/anthropology paper or something you'd expect from an enthnography journal.

[Aodhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great topic that doesn’t get talked about enough, this book gets to the root of the most important question of - why are people not doing anything?

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Norgaard gives interesting observations about how people in a community in Norway manage the distressing emotions that climate change brings, and the implications for collectively dealing with climate change. The one thing that holds this study back is that the ideas about how our social membership affects our responses to troubling issues aren't really falsifiable: if we act, it's because our society lets us act, and if we don't act, it's because our social context makes it impossible to act. So it's hard to see how and why people take action when it's hard to do, and how groups' collective ways of handling difficult issues change. To be fair, Norgaard is trying to explain the common *inaction*, and understanding change isn't easy to do in a manageable period of time. I think her observations provide good starting points for thinking about how these constraints on how we deal with climate change might vary, and what obstacles people who want to push for new climate politics are going to have to figure out how to deal with.

[cerebus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I initially thought I wouldn't be overly pushed on this book when I realised it was primarily an academic sociological work detailing why people don't act even when they are aware of climate change and accept that we are contributing to it. I had been expecting a preaching to the converted, why deniers are deniers, type book, but it is not that.

I'm glad it wasn't what I had expected, and that I didn't give up on it (I'm not a big reader of academic sociological works) as it definitely opened my mind (and touched a few nerves) on the roles community and society can play in enabling those of us who do believe in AGW to either put it to one side or to even justify doing nothing.

[John Crane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full disclosure - I am a psychology teacher. Even with that, at times this book was surprisingly erudite and technical. I am not sure it is a great book for the average reader as the psych lingo can be daunting. It did, however, give me a new way of thinking about the climate change issue and the effectiveness of education (or the lack of effectiveness) in getting people to change their habits. Recommended for anyone who wants to seriously address this issue and attempt to change people's minds.

[Ingrid Moysset · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book! It was a real page-turner. Fascinating to see how this little community in Norway handles climate change: the book makes it obvious that people know, and unveils some ways in which they avoid acting on it.

[Mills College Library]

304.25 N838 2011

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible in-depth study of a community in Norway.