In the early 2000s, sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard studied a Norwegian town that had been severely impacted by climate change via a dearth of snow.  She found that, even when met with irrefutable evidence that their environment was transformed for the worse, many residents appeared to ignore what was happening.  They wouldn't talk about it.  It wasn't a lack of emotion that silenced them; it was the intensity of their feelings.  "The word ignore is a verb," Norgaard wrote... Although ignorance might appear to be passive, Norgaard wrote, in the case of climate change such behavior is the product of a complex, systemic social reaction that allows humans, in the face of potential extinction, to downplay our feelings so that we can continue to go about living our lives.  In order to conform to social or community norms people might ignore massive events like climate change, even when faced with blatant and unavoidable evidence of the event. They might modulate the way they talked about such events in order to uphold their own internal narratives about themselves or avoid talking about it at all in order to assuage feelings of guilt. Or, they might simply disregard reality as a way to cope, to keep going.  Sociologists called these behaviors "emotion management". 

The Last Fire Season

Manjula Martin