People of Carteret County, North Carolina, whose seaside towns and villages are being slashed by the rising Atlantic, will experience yet another monster sea on another day.
However, its electorate elected Donald Trump to the White House, a gentleman who had rejected the science of climate change and had unilaterally withdrawn his nation from the Paris Agreement on climate change before the moon had also set on his first time in business.
It is a paradox that has captivated many people’s minds. The term “denialism” dominated late-night talk shows and became widely known at annual UN summits in 2017, when Trump forked out for the first time to withdraw from the agreement, which spiritually pledges nations to reduce global warming to well below 2°C.
Denialism stifles a compulsive rejection of climate change’s existence. It has led to a community that is unable to distinguish fact from fiction, frequently to the expense of the author. However, climate-conscious officials in a handful of Democrat states have repeated their devotion to medical information.
As an anthropologist, I found myself miserable with the way the famous Trump voting was treated while hardly ever being given the opportunity to speak for themselves. I have participated in climate elections as a scientist, environmentalist and minister, and I felt there was little mirror among the treaty’s activists about their own part in the US exit.
I began a PhD to learn about culture politics ‘ non-participants. It took me to southern North Carolina, where the effects of climate change and a flimsy indifference to the crisis are both present. Like so many other American communities, this place is also known for its coastal communities.
I was interested in learning how people around dealt with climate research and what denialism really looked like. I spent a time talking to people with” Trump Won” colors on their meadows, but I also met experts, government officials, activists and Liberals.
Here is one point I found, and one point I didn’t.
Culture triumphs over “facts”
Although the science of climate change is very powerful, technology alone cannot explain what makes a solution fair or who should have a say in its design. The Paris Agreement, for instance, has a strong social aspect that was hard-won by developing countries, small island states and global activists.
It depicts a planet where wealthy nations like the US are largely to blame for climate change and have to take responsibility for addressing it, and it forbids financial flows to the developing nations to aid in their adaptation. This is a tough narrative for several precarious Americans who don’t feel wealthy or bad.
I saw a similar structure in my own research. Designs that generally guide open relationship with climate action by the federal government and community actions include racism, indigenous information, industrial injustice, and children. These topics won’t always be popular in remote, traditional communities like Carteret state.
According to opinion polls and vote information in the US, climate change is a topic on which voters are divided.
This helps explain why climate change advocates frequently speak to the already-engaged by making reference to other liberal reasons. However, supporters may not always be more influenced by the truth than they are by naysayers. Simply put, it’s simpler to sign up for a reason you can see yourself supporting.
‘ Denialism’ is a poor strategy
What I didn’t get in North Carolina was what I came looking for: environment for.
In the conversations I had in Carteret County, climate change often came up naturally, but the responses were uneven, ranging from curiosity to concern to mistrust and disinterest to fatalism and skepticism. What mention there was hardly fit the stereotype of bitter, conspiracy-fuelled rejection of reality.
In this tight-knit fishing community, people had become wary of outside interventions. Some people were offended by environmental movements because they were given instructions on how to manage a coastline by regulatory scientists or environmental activists.
Others were fatalist about preventing sea level rise; generations spent on the Atlantic’s fierce frontline taught them that you don’t fight storms, you ride them out. Many people were aware of the changes taking place but were unable to devote much time or money, or else found it intolerable to wake up each day thinking about the demise of their local community.
Denialism lacked a justification for this. In contrast, it misrepresented complex social dynamics as a matter of simply accepting or rejecting facts by failing to distinguish between disagreement and lack of agreement.
So why does any of this matter? Because we give ourselves permission to stop enquiring about what we could be doing differently when we identify one group as the sole cause of a problem. After all, climate action’s supporters, from UN officials to individual voters, have a say in what legitimate climate action looks like and who wants to be a part of it.
Reiterating that “science is real,” in the vein of world leaders and American lawn signs, is a rip-off of the US’s withdrawal from Paris, misses the point. Public dissention frequently relates to whose vision of a good world we are working toward rather than whether we should fix it.
This is not to shift blame for Trump’s withdrawal. Nor should it be used to applaud those in politics, business, and the media who have repeatedly omitted the climate debate in defiance of their own policies.
However, limiting public dissention to a matter of misinformation and gullibility implies a lack of humility and ignores concerns that might not turn into opposition if handled politely. We can all do more to reduce the toxicity of climate politics by asking ourselves more questions.
As Trump signed his first executive orders, I pressed send on my thesis’s final corrections. How the international community reacts this time is up for debate, but the last four years have taught me that it may influence whether or not there will be another time.
Karl Dudman is a PhD candidate in anthropology, University of Oxford
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