Nutty Professor?
Waaaayyy past nutty...
“deciding who is culturally authorized to lead the charge for re-thinking and re-inventing social life”
One paradox of Living in Denial is that it reveals a distinctive local culture that seems resilient to the narrated threat of climate change. Cultural practices and collective beliefs in Bygdaby stabilize community life rather than unsettle it. They allow the social organization of denial to emerge as a form of resistance to external global-scale challenges. This perspective challenges the positive valency that has recently been attached to the idea of resilience. Rather than being a desirable property of communities, cultural resilience may in fact become subversive by disabling radical forms of social and political change.
Here is where the real challenge of climate change rests, for denialists and activists alike: deciding who is culturally authorized to lead the charge for re-thinking and re-inventing social life in what is now inescapably a globalized and deeply interconnected world. It used to be kings and priests. Modernity then tried politicians and scientists. We now seem to be trying celebrities and bloggers. But who would the citizens of Bygdaby trust to lead them out of the land of slavery and denial?
http://sociology.uoregon.edu/faculty/living%20in%20denial/nclimate_1085_MAY11_auproof-1.pdf