Assignment 4

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Citizen action is an important way to bring about social and environmental change. But such action depends not just on the perceived existence of a problem but also on people’s understandings of that problem and their emotional responses to it. Kari Marie Norgaard looks at the failure of a community in Norway to take action on global climate change. Given that Norway’s weather has already been measurably affected by climate change and given Norwegians’ relatively high level of knowledge about this issue, Norgaard asks why many Norwegians avoid participation in social action. Norgaard argues that part of the answer lies in the negative emotions—feel- ings of fear, guilt, helplessness, and so forth—that this issue elicits. Her case study doc- uments how community members engage in collective avoiding of the topic because it makes them unhappy or uncomfortable. Collectively, they seek to distance themselves from the problem. While Norgaard focuses on climate change, her argument may be useful in thinking about many different environment-related problems.

. . . Global climate change is arguably the single most significant environmental issue of our time. Scientific reports indicate that global warming will have wide- spread ecological consequences over the coming decades including changes in ecosystems, weather patterns, and sea level rise (IPCC 2001). Impacts on human society are predicted to be widespread and potentially catastrophic as water short- ages, decreased agricultural productivity, extreme weather events, and the spread of diseases take their toll. Potential outcomes for Norway include increased sea- sonal flooding, decreased winter snows and the loss of the gulf stream that cur- rently maintains moderate winter temperatures, thereby providing both fish and a livable climate to the northern region. In Norway public support for the envi- ronmental movement as well as public awareness of, and belief in, the phenom- enon of global warming have been relatively high. In Bygdaby the weather was noticeably warmer and drier than in the past. Yet, in spite of the fact that people

People Want to Protect Themselves a Little Bit

Emotions, Denial, and Social Movement Nonparticipation

Kari Marie Norgaard

16 C o p y r i g h t 2 0 2 0 . R o w m a n & L i t t l e f i e l d P u b l i s h e r s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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240 Part VI • Social Movements

were clearly aware of global warming as a phenomenon, everyday life went on as though global warming, and its associated risks, was not a possibility. Despite the apparent heaviness and seriousness of the issue, it was not discussed in the local newspaper, or the strategy meetings of local political, volunteer or environmental meetings I attended. Aside from casual comments about the weather, everyday life went on as though global warming, and its associated risks—did not exist. Instead, global warming was an abstract concept, that was not integrated into everyday life. Mothers listened to news of unusual flooding as they drove their children to school. Families watched evening news coverage of failing Hague climate talks followed by American made sitcoms. Few people even seemed to spend much time thinking about it. It did not appear to be a common topic of either political or private conversation. How did people manage to outwardly ignore such significant risks? Why did such seemingly serious problems draw so little response?

The people of Bygdaby are not unique. Despite the extreme seriousness of global warming, the pattern of meager public response in the way of social movement activity, behavioral changes or public pressure on governments exists worldwide. Public apathy on global warming has been identified as a signifi- cant concern by environmental sociologists (e.g., Kempton et al. 1995, Dun- lap 1998, Rosa 2001, Brechin 2003). Existing literature emphasizes the notion (either explicitly or implicitly) that information is the limiting factor in public non- response. Yet the people I met were generally well informed about global warming. They expressed concern frequently, yet this concern did not translate into action.

Over time I noticed that conversations about global warming were emotion- ally charged and punctuated with awkward pauses. The people I spent time with and interviewed raised a number of emotional concerns including fear of the future and guilt over their own actions. During an interview, Eirik described the complexity of the issue:

We go on vacation and we go shopping, and my partner drives to work every day. And I drive often up here to my office myself. We feel that we must do it to make things work on a practical level, but we have a guilty conscience, a bit of a guilty conscience.

. . . It became further apparent that community members had a variety of tactics for normalizing these awkward moments and uncomfortable feelings— what Arlie Hochschild calls practices of emotion management (1979, 1983, 1990). This paper describes how the presence and management of unpleasant and troubling emotions associated with global warming worked to prevent social movement participation in this rural Norwegian community.

In Bygdaby the possibility of global warming was both deeply disturbing and almost completely invisible, simultaneously unimaginable and common knowledge. The people I spoke with did believe global warming was happening, expressed concern about it, yet lived their lives as though they did not know. . . .

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Chapter 16 • People Want to Protect Themselves a Little Bit 241

Methods: An Ethnography of the Invisible The observations in this paper are based on one year of field research including 46 interviews, media analysis, and eight months of participant observation. The people I spent time with lived in a rural community of about 14,000 inhabitants in western Norway. Because my research question concerned why people were not more actively engaged with the issue of global warming, gathering infor- mation required a number of strategies to minimize the tendency for people to begin talking about global warming because it was a topic they knew I found interesting. I kept the specific focus of my research vague, telling people that my work was on issues such as “political participation” and “how people think about global issues.” . . . As a participant observer I attended to the kinds of things people talked about, how issues were framed, and especially noted topics that were not discussed. I watched regional television news and read the local and national newspapers. I paid particular attention to beliefs, emotions and cultures of talk with respect to global warming, i.e., whether it was discussed, if so how it came up, how people seemed to feel talking about it. . . . I interviewed as wide a variety of people as I could find. Those I interviewed ranged in age from 19 to early 70s. Respondents were from a variety of occupations, and from six of the nine active local political parties. . . .

. . . I attempted to minimize the degree to which respondents felt a moral pressure to provide a particular answer by first listening to see whether global warming was volunteered as an issue. If global warming was not raised (as it often was not), I asked what people thought about the recent weather (which was widely described as abnormal), and followed with more specific questions such as when they first began thinking about global warming and whether they spoke about global warming with family or friends.

Why Norway? Despite the salience of my questions to the situation in all Western nations, a case study set in Norway is particularly useful. Anyone who begins to talk about movement non-participation, denial and political action in the U.S. immediately encounters a host of relevant questions: “Do people really know the informa- tion?” “Is global warming really happening? I thought it was still controversial.” “Do people really have enough time and money to spare that we can consider it denial that they are not acting?” “People in the U.S. are apathetic in general, why would it be any different on this issue?” Each of these are valid questions that complicate an analysis like mine. Yet each of these factors is either absent or minimized in Norway: Norway has one of the highest levels of GDP of any nation and a fifty year history of welfare state policies that has redistributed this wealth among the people (UNDP 2004). In terms of political activity, Norwe- gians again are exemplary. High percentages of Norwegians vote and are active in local politics. When it comes to information and knowledge, Norwegians are a highly educated public. Norway and Japan are tied for the highest level of

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242 Part VI • Social Movements

newspaper readership in the world. Furthermore, in contrast to the situation in the U.S. (Gelbspan 2004), Norwegian media did raise the issue of global warm- ing in their coverage of the unusual weather, and described potential future weather scenarios and impacts. Although there were certainly skeptics about global warming in Bygdaby, such skepticism is much less than in the United States where large counter campaigns have been waged by industry (McCright and Dunlap 2000, 2003). Finally, Norwegians have been proud of their rela- tionships to nature, environmentalism and leadership on global environmental issues including global warming (Eriksen 1993, 1996). If any nation can find the ability to respond to this problem, it must be in such a place as this, where the population is educated, cared for, politicized and environmentally engaged.

Research in Norway is also unique due to the particularly strong contradic- tion between professed values and the nation’s political economy. In Norway there is strong identification with humanitarian values and a heightened concern for the environment (Reed and Rothenberg 1993). Yet as the world’s sixth larg- est oil producer, Norway is one of the nations of the world that has benefited most from oil production. The presence of high levels of wealth, political activity, education, idealism and environmental values together with a petroleum based economy made the contradiction between knowledge and action particularly vis- ible in Norway.

“Bygdaby” was selected because its size allowed me access to a wide cross section of the community, and the fact that residents spoke a dialect I was able to understand. The presence of a nearby lake (that failed to freeze) and ski area (that opened late) were not conditions I selected for, but ones that nonetheless added to the visibility and salience of global warming for community members.

The Winter of 2000–2001 in Bygdaby Global warming was clearly salient for Norwegians on both the local and national levels during the time period of my research. A number of unusual weather events took place in the fall and winter that year. Most tangible was the very late snowfall and warmer winter temperatures in Bygdaby. Temperatures for the community as reported by the local newspaper showed that average tempera- ture in the Bygdaby region on the whole was warmer than in the past. In fact, as of January 2001 the winter of 2000 was recorded as the second warmest in the past 130 years. Additionally, snowfalls arrived some two months late (midto late January as opposed to November). As a result of these conditions, the ski area opened late, with both recreational and economic effects on the community, and the ice on the lake failed to freeze sufficiently to allow ice fishing, once a frequent activity. In fact, not only did the local ski season start late, the downhill ski area opened with 100% artificial snow—a completely unprecedented event. A woman who was walking on the lake drowned when the ice cracked and she fell through, although this sort of accident could have happened in the spring of any year when the ice normally broke up.

The topic of global warming was also very visible in the media. In addition to weather events, a number of national and international political events brought

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Chapter 16 • People Want to Protect Themselves a Little Bit 243

global warming to Bygdabyingar’s minds. In November, several thousand miles to the South, the nations of the world held climate meetings at the Hague. Both the King and Prime Minister mentioned global warming in their New Year’s Day speeches. Three weeks later on January 22, 2001, the United Nations Intergov- ernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new report on climate. In March U.S. President George Bush declared that following the Kyoto Protocol was not in the economic interests of the United States and flatly rejected it. Each of these events received significant attention in the regional and national press. . . . Indeed I was continually impressed with the level of up to date information that people had regarding global warming. Here is an excerpt from a focus group that I conducted with five female students in their late teens the week after the climate talks at the Hague failed. Note that these young women are aware of the failed talks, are familiar with (and critical of ) the fact that Norway is required to decrease carbon dioxide emissions 5% by the year 2008, and that they feel that global warming is a real issue, observable in their immediate surroundings:

Kari: What have you heard about global warming? Siri: I have heard about the conference, I became a bit afraid when they

didn’t reach agreement . . . Trudi: Our Minister of Environment! In 2008 we will decrease our emissions

by five percent (General laugher) MeTTe: That will help! Kari: And is it something that you feel is really happening, or . . . (Several

speaking at once) MeTTe: Now it is incredible, five degrees Celsius is, you know, really strange . . .

mmm, Ja- Siri: (Interrupting) There should be snow [now]. Trudi: It comes in much closer for us. It is here . . . you notice it. you know,

it’s getting worse and worse . . . Last year there was snow at this time of year. And actually that is the way it should have been for quite some time now.

A Series of Troubling Emotions Although the sense that people fail to respond to global warming because they are too poorly informed (Read et al. 1994, Kempton et al. 1995, Dunlap 1998, Bord et al. 1998, Brechin 2003), too greedy or too individualistic, suffer from incorrect mental models (Bostrom et al. 1994) or faulty decision making pro- cesses (Halford and Sheehan 1991), underlies much of the research in environ- mental sociology, the people I spoke with expressed feelings of deep concern and caring and a significant degree of ambivalence about the issue of global warming. People in Bygdaby told me many reasons why it was difficult to think about this issue. In the words of one man, who held his hands in front of his eyes as he spoke, “people want to protect themselves a bit.” Community members described fears associated with loss of ontological security, feelings of helpless- ness, guilt and the associated emotion of fear of “being a bad person.”. . .

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244 Part VI • Social Movements

Not only were these emotions unpleasant in themselves, the feelings that thinking about global warming raised went against local emotion norms. . . . Emotion norms in Bygdaby (and Norway generally) emphasized the importance of maintaining control (beholde kontroll) and toughness (å være tøff ), and for young people, being cool (kult)—especially in public spaces. Adults, especially men and public figures, faced pressures to be knowledgeable and intelligent. In some settings, especially for educators, there was an emotion norm of maintain- ing optimism. Educators described balancing personal doubts and deep feelings of powerlessness with the task of sending a hopeful message to students. When I spoke with Arne, a teacher at the local agricultural school:

I am unfortunately pessimistic. I just have to say it. But I’m not like that towards the students. You know, I must be optimistic when I speak with the students.

Note that Arne’s use of the phrase “you know” highlights the sense that this reality, the need to be optimistic with students, is taken for granted, incontestable. . . .

Risk, Modern Life, and Fears Regarding Ontological Security

Automobile and plane crashes, toxic chemical spills and explosions, nuclear accidents, food contamination, genetic manipulation, the spread of AIDS, global cli- mate change, ozone depletion, species extinction and the persistence of nuclear weapons arsenals: the list goes on. Risks abound and people are increasingly aware that no one is entirely safe from the hazards of modern living. Risk reminds us of our dependency, interdependency and vulnerability (Jaeger et al. 2001, 13).

One day in mid-December my husband and I, disappointed with the lack of snow in Bygdaby, decided to take the train a few hours away to a neighbor- ing community. The temperature was about minus five and the sun was shining brightly on the bare fields surrounding our house as we loaded our skis into the taxi and headed down the road to the train. “Do you like to ski?” I asked our driver? “Oh yes, but I don’t do much of that anymore,” he replied. “When I was a kid we would have skis on from the first thing in the morning to the end of the day. There was so much more snow back then. When you think of how much has changed in my fifty years it is very scary.”

Global warming threatens biological conditions, economic prospects and social structure (IPCC 2001). At the deepest level, large scale environmental problems such as global warming threaten people’s sense of the continuity of life, what Anthony Giddens calls ontological security (1984, 1991). What will Norwegian winters be like without snow? What will happen to farms in the com- munity in the next generation? . . .

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Chapter 16 • People Want to Protect Themselves a Little Bit 245

Feelings of Helplessness—“You Have to Focus on Something You Can Do”

I think that there are a lot of people who feel that no matter what I do I can’t do anything about that anyway.

As Hege Marie, a student in her late teens described, a second emotion that the topic of global warming evoked was helplessness. The problem seemed so large and involved the cooperation of people in so many different countries. Governments were unable to reach agreement. Perhaps entire economic struc- tures would have to change. Thus it is not surprising that rather than feeling that there was much that could be done, Liv, a woman in her late sixties, pronounced that, “we must take it as it comes,” and Gurid told me, “you have to focus on something you can do or else you become completely hopeless.”

Fear of Guilt Thinking about global warming was also difficult because it raised feelings of guilt. Members of the community told me they were aware of how their actions contributed to the problem and they felt guilty about it.

So many times I have a guilty conscience because I know that I should do some- thing, or do it less. But at the same time there is the social pressure. And I want for my children and for my wife to be able to experience the same positive things that are normal in their community of friends and in this society. It is very . . . I think it is a bit problematic. I feel that I could do more, but it would be at the expense of, it would create a more difficult relationship between me and my chil- dren or my partner. It really isn’t easy.

Guilt was also connected to the sense of global warming as an issue of global inequity: Norwegian wealth and high standard of living are intimately tied to the production of oil. Given their high newspaper readership and level of knowl- edge about the rest of the world, community members were well aware of these circumstances. This understanding contrasted sharply with the deeply ingrained Norwegian values of equality and egalitarianism (Jonassen 1983, Kiel 1993), thus raising feelings of guilt.

Fear of “Being a Bad Person”—Identity: Self and National Images Another source of concern that comes with awareness of global warming is the threat it implies for individual and national self-concepts. . . .

Norwegian public self-image includes a strong self-identification of being environmentally aware and humanitarian (Eriksen 1993, 1996). Norwegians have been proud of their past international leadership on a number of environmental issues including global warming. Stereotypical characterization of Norwegians describes a simple, nature loving people who are concerned with equality and

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246 Part VI • Social Movements

human rights (Eriksen 1993, 1996). Yet Norway has increased production of oil and gas threefold in the last ten years. Expansion of oil production in the 1990s contributed significantly to the already high standard of living, making Norway one of the countries in the world that has most benefited from fossil fuels. In 2001 Norway was the world’s sixth largest oil producer and the world’s second largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia (MoPE 2002). Information about global warming—such as Norway’s inability to reach Kyoto reduction quotas, increas- ing carbon dioxide emissions and government expansions of oil development— makes for an acute contradiction between the traditional Norwegian values and self-image and the present day economic situation in which high electricity use, increasing consumption and wealth from North Sea oil make Norway one of the larger per capita contributors to the problem of global warming. . . . For Norwegians, information on global warming not only contradicts their sense of being environmentally responsible. As a problem generated by wealthy nations for which people in poor nations disproportionately suffer, knowledge of global warming also challenges Bygdabyingar’s sense of themselves as egalitarian and socially just. . . .

A Cultural Tool Kit of Emotion Management Strategies If the emotions of fear, guilt, hopelessness or “fear of being a bad person” worked against social change in Bygdaby, how might this have happened? In Bygdaby there were active, observable moments which, although fleeting, pointed to the role of emotions in the generation of non-participation as an active process— what Nina Eliasoph calls the production of apathy (1998). If what a person feels is different from what they want to or are supposed to feel they may engage in some level of emotional management (Hochschild 1979, 1983, 1990, Thoits 1996). While the act of modifying, suppressing or emphasizing an emotion is carried out by individuals, emotions are being managed to fit social expectations, which in turn often reproduce larger political and economic conditions. . . . In the case of global warming in Bygdaby, emotions that were uncomfortable to individuals were also uncomfortable because they violated norms of social inter- action in the community. And at least some of these emotion norms in turn nor- malized Norway’s economic position as a significant producer of oil.

. . . In Bygdaby people managed the unpleasant emotions described in the previous section by avoiding thinking about them, by shifting attention to pos- itive self-representations, and—especially in terms of the emotion of guilt—by framing them in ways that minimized their potency. When it came to the strategy of framing and of shifting attention to positive self-representations, community members had available a set of “stock” social narratives upon which to draw, many of which were generated by the national government and conveyed to the public through the media. . . .

Ann Swidler uses the metaphor of “tools in a tool kit” to describe the set of resources available to people in a given culture for solving problems (1986). Using this metaphor I will briefly describe how these culturally available

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Chapter 16 • People Want to Protect Themselves a Little Bit 247

strategies served as tools that were used to achieve selective attention and per- spectival selectivity—and thereby to manage thinking in such a way as to manage emotions.

Selective Attention Selective attention can be used to decide what to think about or not to think about, screening out for example painful information about problems for which one does not have solutions (e.g., “I don’t really know what to do, so I just don’t think about that”). Strategies of emotion management in the form of selective attention were primarily aimed at managing the emotions of fear and helplessness. Here I describe the techniques of controlling exposure to infor- mation, focusing on something you can do and not thinking too far into the future.

“We Can’t Dig Ourselves into Depression, Right?”: Controlling Exposure to Information . . . Community members described feelings of uncertainty as being easily evoked by too much information, thus adhering to the emotion norms of maintaining optimism and control required managing exposure to information on global warming. Educators and activists in particular had to be careful not to become overwhelmed in order to continue their work:

No, but you can’t—you know I feel that in a way the philosophy of all this is happening so fast. I do as much as I can, and we can’t focus on what’s painful. We don’t go in and have meetings and talk about how gruesome everything is. We talk about how it is and can’t dig ourselves down into depression, right?

Another activist described how she reads very little of the details, that it is in fact “better not to know everything.” People were aware that there was the potential that global warming would radically alter life within the next decades, and when they thought about it they felt worried, yet they did not go about their days wondering what things would be like for their children, whether these could be the last years farming could take place in Bygdaby, or whether their grandchildren would be able to ski on real snow. They spent their days thinking about more local, manageable topics. Mari described how, “you have the knowl- edge, but you live in a completely different world.” . . .

“I Don’t Allow Myself to Think so far Ahead” There is a lot of unrest in the country. There is a lot that is negative. Then I become like—yeah, pfff! But when someone has something that they are work- ing on, in relation to that you are trying to influence—then it’s like, okay to be optimistic after all. But I think that this can just explode around us, and so it is well that I don’t allow myself to think so far ahead.

The most effective way to manage unpleasant emotions was to turn your attention to something else, as Lise, a young mother describes in the above pas- sage, or by focusing attention onto something positive, as she also describes. . . .

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248 Part VI • Social Movements

Focusing on Something You Can Do Similar to the strategies of controlling exposure to unpleasant information and not thinking too far ahead was the strategy of focusing on something that you could do. . . . Peter, a local politician, describes how global warming is a theme that “everyone is interested in” but which does not receive attention on the local level because there “isn’t so much that you can do.”

Yes, it is of course a theme that everyone is interested in, but locally it isn’t dis- cussed much because . . . well climate change, you know there isn’t so much you can do with it on a local level, but of course everyone sees that something must be done . . .

Peter’s comments are similar to the earlier passage with Lise who describes both the need for optimism and the underlying hopelessness that global warm- ing raised.

Perspectival Selectivity Unpleasant emotions of guilt and those associated with a “spoiled identity” could be managed through the cognitive strategy of perspectival selectivity. Perspec- tival selectivity, “refers to the angle of vision that one brings to bear on certain events” (Rosenberg 1991, 134). Euphemisms, technical jargon and word chang- ing are used to dispute the meanings of events such as when military generals speak of “collateral damage” rather than the killing of citizens. Stanley Cohen writes, “Officials do not claim that ‘nothing happened’ but what happened is not what you think it is, not what it looks like, not what you call it” (2001: 7). Here I describe two “stock” social narratives that were frequently used to change the angle of vision one might bring to the facts about Norway’s role in the problem of global warming.

“Amerika” as a Tension Point Bygdabyingar knew an amazing number of facts about the U.S. References to the U.S. appeared in numerous conversations I participated in and overheard while in Bygdaby. I use the Norwegian spelling of the word to indicate that I am talking about a stereotypical Norwegian view of the U.S., what Steinar Bryn calls Mythic America (Bryn 1994). There are many stereotypical images of the U.S. in Norway, but to me what is most interesting is not the images themselves but how they were used.

Stories about “Amerika” were often told in strategic moments to deflect Norwegian responsibility and shortcomings and to support notions of Norwe- gian exceptionalism (we may not be the best, but we aren’t anything as bad as they are). For example, in late April of 2001 U.S. President Bush made the infamous statement that he would not sign the Kyoto Protocol on the grounds that it was, “not in the U.S. economic interests.” Many Bygdabyingar took the opportunity to tell me of their criticism of this position. Bush’s comment was widely repeated and discussed in the Norwegian press and in public commentary. Here the statement was used in a motivational speech by a local young woman on May 1, 2001:

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Chapter 16 • People Want to Protect Themselves a Little Bit 249

The Kyoto agreement is about cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 5 percent. And even that ridiculous pace was too much for the climatehooligan George W. Bush in the United States. The head of the USA’s environmental protec- tion department said that “We have no interest in meeting the conditions of the agreement.” Well, that may be so. But it is other countries that will be hit the hardest from climate change . . .

Yet despite widespread criticism of the United States for taking such a posi- tion, this is essentially the same move that the Norwegian government made in dropping national emissions targets, increasing oil development, taking a lead- ing role in the development of the carbon trading schemes known as the Kyoto and Clean Development Mechanism and shifting the focus from a national to an international agenda (Hovden and Lindseth 2002). In this context, criti- cizing the poor climate record of the U.S. directs attention away from Nor- way’s shifting behavior, sending the message that at home things are not that bad. . . .

“Norway Is a Little Land” A second narrative, “Norway is a little land” deflected troubling information and emotions connected to Norway’s role in global warming with the subtext that, “we are so few, it doesn’t really matter what we do anyway.” While it often con- veyed a genuine sense of powerlessness, this discourse also worked to let people off the hook, creating the sense of “why bother.” During a conversation about his opposition to Norway joining the European Union, Joar, a Bygdabyingar in his early 50s explained how this emphasis on Norway’s size, while in some sense true, is also a strategic construction:

Kari: But what kind of a role do you think that Norway should take internationally?

Joar: Well, we are of course a very small country, almost without meaning, if you think economically we are completely uninteresting.

Kari: But Norway has lots of oil compared with other countries. Joar: yeah, yeah, okay. We are in fact almost at the level of Saudi Arabia. But it

[is] of course an advantage to be meaningless. It doesn’t really matter for us to argue, they don’t bother to get mad at us, because we are so meaningless. And in that connection, we are a bit you know, peaceful, right. We have been involved in both the Middle East and . . . (here he refers to the Oslo Accords and his second example is not spoken, just given as a gesture of the hand for emphasis).

Note that as the conversation continues he uses Norway’s small economy as the example of why it “is meaningless.” When I asked him about Norway’s oil, he suddenly “remembers” the fact that Norway is, after Saudi Arabia, the second largest oil exporter in the world. Then he explains the strategic advantage of being “meaningless,” that other countries don’t bother to get upset with Nor- way. At the end of the passage he adds to the construction of Norway as a nation not worth getting upset with by drawing on the sense of Norway as a “peaceful nation” (referring to the peace prize) and their involvement in the Oslo Accords.

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250 Part VI • Social Movements

In being small, meaningless and peaceful, he is constructing in our conversation a sense of Norwegian innocence that is very prevalent.

The phrase “Norway is a little land” gives the sense that they are doing “their part” and turns blame back onto those who are “worse,” especially the United States, as described earlier. It serves to imply that, “the problem isn’t really us. We, in fact, are innocent.” . . .

Discussion: Emotions, Emotion Management, and the “Production of Apathy” Non-response to the possibility of global warming may seem “natural” or “self- evident”—from a social movement or social problem perspective not all potential issues get translated into political action. Yet with a closer view we can under- stand non-response as a social process. Things could have been different. Com- munity members could have written letters to the local paper articulating global warming as a political issue, they could have brought the issue up in one of the many public forums, made attempts to plan for the possibility of what the future weather scenarios might bring, put pressure on local and national leaders, decreased their automobile use, asked for national subsidies to cover the eco- nomic impacts of the warm winter, or engaged their neighbors, children, and political leaders in discussions about what climate change might mean for their community in the next ten and twenty years. Indeed in other parts of the world things were different. The severe flooding in England that fall was linked to global warming by at least some of the impacted residents. People from affected communities in England traveled to the climate talks at the Hague to protest. More recently, three cities in the United States have initiated a lawsuit against the federal government over global warming. Bygdabyingar could have made a similar move—rallied around the lack of snow and its economic and cultural impacts on some level, any level, be it local, national or international. But they did not.

Most of the emotions Bygdabyingar felt in conjunction with information on global warming: fear, guilt and concern over individual and collective identity could have motivated social action. Perhaps in some cases these emotions did generate actions, but they did not generate many. . . .

. . . [E]motions of fear and helplessness contradicted emotion norms of being optimistic and maintaining control. These emotions were particularly managed through the use of selective attention: controlling one’s exposure to informa- tion, not thinking too far into the future and focusing on something that could be done. Although the range of emotion management techniques appeared to be used across the community, I found these strategies used with more frequency by educators, men and public figures. The emotion of guilt and the fear of being a bad person or desire to view oneself and the collective community in positive light contrasted not only with specific local emotion norms surrounding patrio- tism, but also the general social psychological need to view oneself in a positive light (i.e., manage identity). Guilt and identity were managed through the use of

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Chapter 16 • People Want to Protect Themselves a Little Bit 251

perspectival selectivity: by emphasizing Norway’s small population size and that no matter what they did, Norwegians were not as bad as the “Amerikans.”

Conclusion: Emotions, Denial, and Social Movement Nonparticipation Emotions can be a source of information (Hochschild 1983) and an impetus for social action (Jasper 1997, 1998, Polletta 1998), but my observations in Bygdaby suggest that the desire to avoid unpleasant emotions and the practice of emotion management can also work against social movement participation. Although not normally applied to environmental issues, research on the sociology of emotions is highly relevant to understanding community member’s reactions to global warm- ing. While current work in environmental sociology has emphasized the “infor- mation deficit model” (Buckeley 2000), my ethnographic and interview data from a rural Norwegian community do not support this interpretation. Instead this research indicates community members had sufficient information about the issue but avoided thinking about global warming at least in part because doing so raised fears of ontological security, emotions of helplessness and guilt, and was a threat to individual and collective senses of identity. Rather than experience these unpleasant emotions, people used a number of strategies including emotion man- agement to hold information about global warming at arm’s length.

Emotions played a key role in denial, providing much of the reason why peo- ple preferred not to think about global warming. Furthermore, the management of unpleasant and “unacceptable” emotions was a central aspect of the process of denial, which in this community was carried out through the use of a cul- tural stock of strategies and social narratives that were employed to achieve selec- tive attention and perspectival selectivity. Thus movement non- participation in response to the issue of global warming did not simply happen, but was actively produced as community members kept the issue of global warming at a distance via a cultural tool kit of emotion management techniques.

Note Norgaard, Kari Marie. 2006. “ ‘People Want to Protect Themselves a Little Bit’: Emotions, Denial,

and Social Movement Nonparticipation.” Sociological Inquiry 76 (3): 372–96.

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