Contradictory Consciousness: Climate Denial and Wildfire Adaptation in Rural California

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 4. Sociologies of Denial & Crisis

Abstract

This article examines how rural white residents in a Sierra Nevada community navigate the tension between a hegemonic right-wing political ideology and the material reality of escalating wildfire threats. Drawing on scholarship on
contradictory consciousness, cultural repertoires, and dual-consciousness models of culture in action, I argue that proximity to catastrophic environmental destruction
does not produce ideological shifts on climate change. Instead, residents engage in what I term climate sufferance — a process of enduring, tolerating, and adapting to unavoidable climate impacts through practical mitigation behaviors such as fuel
reduction and home hardening. Rather than abandoning climate denialism, residents invoke cultural tools that align their actions with an alternative ideology consistent with those behaviors, preserving their broader political identity. This study contributes to debates on the relationship between place, ideology, and climate attitudes by demonstrating that material conditions can drive adaptive action even as ideological belief remains unchanged. Climate sufferance emerges as a form of individual and community-level agency operating within — and
constrained by — a context of hegemonic political inaction on climate change.

Author

• Zulema Valdez, University of California-Merced