ABSTRACT
Stanley Cohen, a sociologist develops his analysis in the context of reactions to atrocities, human rights violations and other kinds of abuse, but it transfers readily to environmental situations, and in particular to that of climate change. Cohen distinguishes literal from what he calls interpretive and implicatory denial. Literal denial says, of something tacitly recognised as a cause for concern, that there is nothing really the matter, appearances here are deceptive and actually, on proper scrutiny, there's no problem. Interpretive denial says, usually more plausibly, that while something is indeed the matter, it's not actually that serious. The author considers both community routines for normalising evasion and the fixed-grin optimism of the neo-environmentalists as forms of environmental denial in practice. But to identify the pervasive culture of denial within which these and similar practices subsist, and the context of assumptions that licenses such denial, must turn to the sustainable development paradigm.
