That Which They Will Not See: Climate Denial as a Vector of Epistemological Crisis in the Contemporary United States

Abstract

Climate denial continues as a cultural epistemology for anthropogenic climate change in the United States, despite worsening impacts. This article offers an ethnographic account of rural areas in three states in the southern US – Arizona, Louisiana, and Missouri – based on long-term participant observation and interview data. Engaging with the literature on agnotology, the social construction of ignorance, the argument is made that this literature as it pertains to climate denial does not go far enough in accounting for the persistence of the rejection of climate science. Theoretically drawing from anthropological work on the incommensurability of paradigms, the argument is based on a tripartite construction of denial as produced through an interaction of a cultural norm of radical empiricism, a political-media ecosystem funded by fossil fuel companies, and a cosmological schema derived from conservative white evangelicalism. The result of this process is an epistemological crisis in contemporary American society.