Odds of Tomorrow: The Social Organization of Climate Change Responses and Education

• In Event: 31.027 - The Failure to Act: Climate Change Injustice, Denial, and Education

Abstract

This paper combines examples from recent novels focused on the imagined futures of climate change (Bloom, 2014) with research literature, in order to inquire into the sociology of climate change denial and implications for curriculum and educational research.

In Nathaniel Rich’s (2013) ‘cli-sci’ novel Odds Against Tomorrow two main characters manifest inverse reactions to the realities of a warmed world. Mitchell Zukor placates his ‘real, hot, viral’ fear (p. 25) by researching and predicting possible disaster scenarios wrought by climate change, while the ill Elsa Bruner cultivates an idyllic eco-retreat, living in a ‘permanent condition of hopeful, childlike, brainless bliss’ (p. 62). Through their written correspondence Rich’s characters weigh the relative merits of cultivating rational fear versus fearless curiosity in the face of death. In contrast to these opposing reactions, facing climate catastrophe ‘Most New Yorkers carried on with their usual activities, pantomiming quotidian normalcy, as if nothing were wrong’ (p. 102).

In her study on living in denial, Kari Marie Norgaard (2011) investigates psychological and sociological responses to climate change through data gathered in Norway and the US. She adopts the term ‘double reality’ to describe the disjuncture between the collectively constructed sense of normal everyday life, and the troubling knowledge of the causes and impacts of climate change. Like Rich’s New Yorkers, the participants in Norgaard’s study manifested signs of such a double reality, as they recognized the impacts of climate change, but nonetheless remained in a state of inaction and denial.

Focusing on the ‘social organization of denial’ as the social norms and broader political context shaping inaction (Zerubavel, 2006; Klein, 2014), this paper considers the processes by which much of western society is collectively distancing ourselves from potential action through the norms of emotion and attention (Norgaard, 2011). Rather than the literal denial of climate change denialists, this paper is concerned with ‘implicatory denial’ in which what is minimized is not information, but the political or moral implications that follow from that knowledge (Cohen, 2001). Norgaard suggests that it is too little emotion or surprisingly, too much emotion, that leads to implicatory denial. She writes, "Indeed, if we see information on climate change as being too disturbing to be fully absorbed or integrated into daily life…[denial can] be understood as testament to our human capacity for empathy, compassion, and an underlying sense of moral imperative to respond, even as we fail to do so. And thus, it is when we take this latter view of denial that we see how apathy is the mark of suffering." (p. 61)

Beyond the paralysis of apathy or heightened individual responses such as those of Rich’s characters Mitchell Zucknor or Elsa Bruner, this paper inquires into whether through better understanding the emotional and social organization of denial, we can turn towards other forms of ‘social organization,’ including through curriculum and research. As Rich’s novel asks, in the face of the knowledge of climate change and its catastrophic implications for humans and planetary life, what kind of ‘futurists’ can humans become?

Author

• Marcia McKenzie, University of Saskatchewan