Don't Even Think About It (13 page)

So far this book has focused on what is said about climate change, including the loud and intensely politicized debate and the arguments about cost, certainty, and impacts. But of equal interest is what is deliberately
not
said, and the extent to which climate change is not just marginalized but also entirely removed from the public consciousness—sitting permanently on the beach but never in the pool.

17

Don't Even Talk About It!

 

The Invisible Force Field of Climate Silence

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am constantly dropping the
term
climate change
into conversations with strangers. I may talk about my own work or relate it to the weird weather or some other issue that is hogging a prime spot in their pool of worry. I am very relaxed and casual about it—after all, no one wants to find herself sitting next to a zealot on a long-distance train journey.

Really, though, it doesn't seem to matter how I say it, because the result is almost always the same: The words collapse, sink, and die in midair, and the conversation suddenly changes course. It is like an invisible force field that you discover only when you barge right into it. Few people go that far, because, without ever having been told, they have somehow learned that this topic is out-of-bounds. That is why they know that if someone else inadvertently enters this zone, it is a good idea to find something new to talk about.

In America I find that the native friendliness dissipates the instant the words
climate change
enter a conversation. If I am talking to a couple, one person will continue to talk with me (it would be rude not to) while the other will instantly turn away and find some adjacent distraction.

When pressed two thirds of people admit that they rarely or never talk about it, even inside the close circle of their friends and family members. Women talk about it far less than men do, and as a group, younger women talk about it less than anyone, especially, as I will explain later, those with children. Another survey found that a quarter of people have never discussed climate change with anyone at all. In real life, it seems that the most influential climate narrative of all may be the non-narrative of collective silence.

None of this is of any surprise to Eviatar Zerubavel, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University. Zerubavel is an expert on the sociology of socially constructed silence, which, he says, is as much a part of our communication as speech, “like a substance that fills in the pauses and cracks and crannies of our discourse.”

I ask Zerubavel how we can study a silence—how we can measure something that people do not recognize as being absent. He puts it this way: “We have not talked at all about zoological gardens. That is not because we are deliberately avoiding it; the subject has simply not come up in our conversation. I would call this
inattention
because we can easily explain why we have not talked about it. But
disattention
is something very different. That is when we deliberately fail to notice something and cannot even explain that silence.”

“So,” he continues, “what I look for is a silence about the silence—what I would call a meta-silence. The meta-silence is that we don't talk about the elephant in the room,
and
we don't talk about the fact that we don't talk about it.” And that, as Zerubavel points out with glee, means that the refusal to talk about the elephant becomes an even bigger elephant. Presumably, both have escaped from the zoological gardens we have been not talking about.

My friend Mayer Hillman, a senior fellow at the Policy Studies Institute and a passionate climate change campaigner, tells a story that shows this meta-silence at work. He was attending a dinner party with retired liberal professionals like himself. People were talking about their latest holiday trips, and Mayer could not resist bringing up the issue of climate change and the impacts of their airline flights on future generations.

The room went very quiet. Then a guest decided to break the ice. “My word,” she said, “what a
lovely
spinach tart.” Oh yes, everyone agreed emphatically, it was a
very lovely
spinach tart. According to Mayer, they spent the next ten minutes talking about the tart, the fresh spinach, and the recipe. In Zerubavel's terms, this inability to talk about the issue or to even verbalize the reasons for not talking about it is a meta-silence.

Zerubavel cites the nineteenth-century sociologist Emile Durkheim's observation that there is a distinction between individual facts—things that you do at an individual level—and social facts, the behaviors that operate at a collective level. So, he says, “it makes a lot of sense to talk about denial and silence about climate change as operating both individually and totally differently at the collective level.”

In a pioneering study, Kari Norgaard, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, set out to understand how people in a remote coastal town in Norway came to terms with climate change. In the course of her forty-six interviews, Norgaard repeatedly hit the invisible force field of silence I described. Most telling, she wrote, was that the issue often killed conversation: “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.'”

Yet people openly recognized that the weather was changing dramatically. In particular there was deep concern that the ski hill, an essential component of the town's local economy and identity, was opening later and later in the holiday season and even then only with the help of artificial snow. As I found in Bastrop and New Jersey, despite the evidence seen with their own eyes, people refused to discuss climate change. Norgaard found that it formed a detached reality—or, as a local teacher put it to her, “We live in one way and we think in another. We learn to think in parallel. It's a skill, an art of living.”

Norwegians have particularly good reasons for ignoring climate change. Norway's cultural identity, Norgaard explained, is based around a mythic narrative that it is a small and humble nation that lives simply and close to nature. Norwegians pride themselves on being honest and conscientious global citizens and their government speaks often of being a world leader on climate change.

Norway is a leader all right, though not in the way it would like us to think. It is the eighth largest exporter of crude oil in the world, and its emissions grew five times faster than its already generous allowances under the Kyoto Protocol. Everyone in Norway has a direct personal stake in this oil economy, thanks to the six hundred billion dollars saved in the state oil fund, which now includes a two-billion-dollar stake in Alberta's tar sands. All in all, Norway is a spectacularly large contributor to climate change and, thanks to its egalitarian traditions, it has shared that responsibility across its entire population.

Norgaard found that Norwegians have responded to this internal conflict by placing climate change outside their “norms of attention,” which she defines as “the social rules that define what is or not acceptable to recognize or talk about.” Thus, she says, people deliberately chose not to know too much in order to maintain their cultural identity as responsible citizens. “‘Knowing' or ‘not knowing,'” she says, “is itself a political act.”

Like other academics who challenge climate change denial, Norgaard discovered for herself the mechanisms by which these politicized norms are policed and transgressors are punished. In 2012 a University of Oregon press release announced that that her research argues that cultural resistance must be “recognised and treated.” The offhand comment—which did not even come from Norgaard—was eagerly distributed by Rush Limbaugh and other vocal climate deniers and led to a torrent of Internet abuse and pack bullying. A modest and diligent young academic now has her face permanently scattered across the Internet, photoshopped with swastikas, posted onto nude models, and stamped with vicious schoolyard abuse. One video about Norgaard was so offensive that YouTube removed it.

Martin Bursík, the former environment minister of the Czech Republic, described to me a similar distinction between individual facts and social facts in his country. Former Czech president Václav Klaus denied climate science—the only head of state in the world to do so. This, and a deeply entrenched social silence about the pollution of the coal industry, helped create a virtual taboo on public discussion of the topic. There is, Bursík said, not a single person in the Czech government who would be prepared to speak at an event on climate change. Privately, 92 percent of Czechs regard climate change as a serious or very serious problem, but, as Bursík explained, forty years of communist dictatorship has taught people to be very aware of boundaries defining what it is permissible to know. He says that they have learned “not to talk too loudly because the neighbors can listen through the wall.”

In this context, it is not surprising that there are multiple similarities between the mechanisms of climate change denial and the socially constructed silence found around human rights abuses.

The late Stanley Cohen, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, drew strongly on his own experience as a Jewish South African to document the processes by which entire societies avoid dealing with collective human rights abuses. He highlighted the difference between ignorance (not knowing), denial (the refusal to know), and disavowal (the active choice not to notice). Of the latter, which he argued applied especially well to climate change, he wrote, “We are vaguely aware of choosing not to look at the facts, but not quite conscious of just what it is we are evading.” So, Cohen pointed out, we notice that our neighbors disappeared in the night, or that cattle trucks are heading east full of people but returning empty, but somehow we also know that we should not talk about it.

Such comparisons are useful for the light they throw on human behavior, but we need to be careful of applying such historical experience too literally to climate change. There were real personal dangers in challenging the Gestapo or NKVD. Even within the Tea Party, the worst that would come from acknowledging climate change would be a degree of social estrangement.

It is, though, revealing that human rights organizations, which should be alert to the processes of social disavowal, have been so slow to acknowledge climate change, especially given that security analysts regard it to be a key driver of future conflict and forced migration. In 2006, the year that
An Inconvenient Truth
came out, I found that Amnesty International had not one mention of climate change on its website. It consistently received less than five mentions on the websites of many other leading progressive organizations—Physicians for Human Rights, the AFL-CIO, Oxfam America, CARE, World Vision, and the YWCA among them.

By way of comparison, I searched for two control terms that had no reason at all for being on these groups' websites: “donkey” and “ice cream.” On each site, these irrelevant terms appeared far more often. Human Rights Watch mentioned donkeys four times more often than climate change. Refugees International mentioned ice cream nearly eight times more.

My interviews with decision makers in these organizations confirmed that they had
deliberately
framed climate change as being outside their norms of attention because they were unsure how they could intervene, had no capacity for uncertain emerging problems, and had decided that it was an environmental problem and therefore outside their mission. Only now that they have begun, belatedly, to make their voices heard, is climate change beginning to be recognized as a leading social rights issue.

Formal science is also subject to its own norms of attention about what it seeks to know or not know. A growing field of study is the “sociology of ignorance,” which explores the field of “non-knowledge”—information that is deliberately not acquired because it is considered too sensitive, dangerous, or taboo to produce.

In-depth interviews by Joanna Kempner at Rutgers University found that scientists were committed to a heroic narrative of their pursuit of knowledge. “Our job,” one said, “is to explore truth, not determining whether that truth is dangerous or that truth is unpleasant.” However, while they welcomed controversy in their fields, they all wanted to avoid public controversy, which would take up their time and potentially threaten their funding streams. And who would not want to avoid the death threats or vicious abuse dished out to Kari Norgaard or Michael Mann? Scientists seek, in their own jargon to “lunatic-proof” their lives and to protect their families, and inevitably, this will determine what they study.

Ignorance is also generated by the academic process itself. As academics become ever more specialized and bury ever deeper into their silos, it becomes harder for them to acquire more generalized knowledge. There is a knowledge-ignorance paradox that the ever-increasing growth in knowledge leads to a simultaneous growth in what is not known.

By this reckoning, there is a great deal that is not known about climate change. As noted throughout this book, the people who take ownership of climate change consistently attempt to shape it in their own image, defined by their own discipline. Climate change, though, requires a much more creative and flexible approach that also considers what is not known or not said. It is not surprising that the vast majority of the specialists I have interviewed for this book are creative pioneers who resist easy categories and explore the boundaries between disciplines.