To know or not to know?

It seems like it is more "to know, but not to know".  In a few of the readings we are looking at right now, denial around climate change is meant in the less literal sense of denial.  Norgaard (2011) examines why it is that people who know about climate change, and believe in it, still remain passive and do nothing.  Effectively, they live their daily lives as if it is not happening.  This phenomenon is referred to as "knowing, but not knowing".  So it isn't always that people don't know about the problem or don't believe it is there, they just come up with internal coping mechanisms to not have to fully accept it or incorporate that knowing into their way of life.

It is hard not to be drawn right back into the world of UN conferences and the climate change activism world when I read articles like this.  We have all had so many discussions trying to solve and understand this problem.  Why on earth are people not taking this more seriously? Why are they not acting?  As I noted in one of my last blogs, we even examine why we ourselves are not doing more! I wont go down that road this time as I addressed that fairly heavily in a previous blog.

What I wanted to touch on in this post are some of the ways that people normalize information about climate change as I have definitely seen this in my work on climate.

The first is perspectival selectivity, which basically means that you can be selective about the perspective that you approach it from.  Norgaard (2011) notes that she saw this in the group she was working with in Norway, when people would say that America is the real problem, and that Norway is just a small drop in the bucket.  This allows people to justify inaction.  Hmm... where have I seen this up close?  Canada refusing to take action on climate change until China and India agree to do the exact same?  Yes, I'd say that is a pretty good example. The government definitely uses this to placate people and to convince people that we are such a small part of the problem.  They express the facts in ways that make it sound like we are having almost no impact.  What they don't do is look at the amount of per capita emissions we are responsible for.  The result of this is that many Canadian citizens utilize perspectival selectivity to not have to take any responsibility for this serious issue.

This is also referred to as "denial of self-involvement", and it isn't only countries that succumb to this.  Individuals do the exact same thing, but on a different scale. It is pretty easy to sit in your car, idling in a traffic jam for half an hour and justify it to yourself by thinking that "compared to big oil and other industry I am really not doing much".  It is the idea that the one person or one country's impact is so small that it doesn't really matter.  The flip side of this also comes up, which is that people feel too small to do anything to fix the problem, and that also gives them an out from being a part of the solution. Thoughts like, "what good will it do? I'm just one person" are common, and I have heard these sentiments from friends, colleagues and prolific "commenters" who like to peruse climate-focused articles.

The other interesting way that people justify their actions or lack of action is called "claim to virtue". This is the "it's less bad, so it's good" approach.  This is another approach that we have seen in Canada and the United States with these oxymoronic ideas of things like "ethical oil" and "clean coal".  And it truly is ironic to think that anything that is pumping carbon up into the atmosphere is in any way a part of the solution.  But people buy it.  Because they want to.  Because the reality is not nice.  Because if they "don't know", then they don't have to act.  So... better off to just keep knowing, but not knowing.



References:

Lertzman, R., & Norgaard, K. (2011). A dialog between Renee Lertzman and Kari Norgaard. Ecopsychology, 3(1), 5-9.

Norgaard, K. (2011). Chapter 27: Climate Denial: Emotion, Psychology, Culture and Political Economy. In J. Dryzek, R. Norgaard, & D. Schlosberg (Eds), The Oxford Handbook on Climate Change and Society (pp.399-413). New York: Oxford University Press.