| Global climate change is arguably the single most significant environmental issue of our time. Scientific reports indicate that global warming will have widespread ecological consequences over the coming decades including changes in ecosystems, weather patterns and sea level rise. Potential outcomes for Norway include increased seasonal flooding, decreased winter snows and the loss of the Gulf Stream that currently maintains moderate winter temperatures, thereby providing both fish and a livable climate to the northern region. In Norway public support for the environmental movement as well as public awareness of, and belief in, the phenomenon of global warming have been relatively high. Yet, despite the fact that people are clearly aware of global warming as a phenomenon, everyday life goes on as though global warming, and its associated risks, do not exist. Existing sociological research views information as the limiting factor in public response to climate change, an approach that has been characterized as the “information deficit model”. While information deficit explanations are indispensable, they do not account for the behavior of the significant number of people who do know about global warming, believe it is happening, and express concern but do little about it.; Using ethnographic field work, interviews and media analysis from Bygdaby, a rural Norwegian community, this research describes global warming as an issue about which people care and have a fair amount of information, but one about which they don't really want to know and, in some sense, don't know how to know. I describe public non-response to global warming as a product of socially organized denial. This denial is produced through cultural practices of everyday life. Community members collectively hold information about global warming at arm's length by participating in cultural norms of attention, emotion, and conversation, and by using a series of cultural narratives to deflect disturbing information and normalize a particular version of reality, one in which “everything is fine”. I characterize the features of everyday life from emotion norms to cultural narratives that members of Bygdaby have available to keep information at arms length as tools of order and tools of innocence. |
