The staggering rate of environmental pollution and animal abuse despite constant efforts to educate the public and raise awareness challenges the prevailing belief that the absence of serious action is a consequence of a poorly informed public. In recent decades alternative explanations of social and political inaction have emerged, including denialism. Challenging the information-deficit model, denialism proposes that people actively avoid unpleasant information that threatens their established worldviews, lifestyles, and identities. Environmental and Animal Abuse Denial: Averting Our Gaze analyzes how people avoid awareness of climate change, environmental pollution, animal abuse, and the animal industrial complex. The contributors examine the theory of denialism in regards to environmental pollution and animal abuse through a range of disciplines, including social psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and law.
Tomaz Grusovnik is associate professor of philosophy of education and senior research fellow in the faculty of education at the University of Primorska in Slovenia. Reingard Spannring is a sociologist at the Institute for Educational Science, University of Innsbruck in Austria. Karen Lykke Syse holds a PhD in cultural history from the University of Oslo and is an agronomist and ethnologist.
Introduction: Introducing Denialism in Environmental and Animal Abuse Tomaz Grusovnik, Reingard Spannring and Karen Lykke Syse Chapter 1: From Denial to Moral Disengagement: How Integrating Fundamental Insights from Psychology Can Help Us Better Understand Ongoing Inaction in the Light of an Exacerbating Climate Crisis Susanne Stoll-Kleemann Chapter 2: Denial as a Sense of Entitlement: Assessing the Role of Culture Arne Johan Vetlesen Chapter 3: Skepticism and Animal Virtues: Denialism of Animal Morality Tomaz Grusovnik Chapter 4: Human Uniqueness, Animal Minds, and Anthropodenial Adam See Chapter 5: Suffering Animals: Creaturely Fellowship and its Denial Craig Taylor Chapter 6: Brave New Salmon: From Enlightened Denial to Enlivened Practices Martin Lee Mueller and Katja Maria Hydle Chapter 7: The Animal that Therefore was Removed from View: The Presentation of Meat in Norway, 1950-2020 Karen Lykke Syse and Kristian Bjorkdahl Chapter 8: Political Economy of Denialism: Addressing the Case of Animal Agriculture John Sorenson and Atsuko Matsuoka Chapter 9: Celebrate the Anthropocene? Why "Techno-Eco-Optimism" is a Strategy of Ultimate Denial Helen Kopnina, Joe Gray, Haydn Washington and John Piccolo Chapter 10: The Horse in the Room: The Denial of Animal Subjectivity and Agency in Social Science Research on Human-Horse Relationships Reingard Spannring and Jose De Giorgio-Schoorl Chapter 11: Still in the Shadow of Man? Judicial Denialism and Nonhuman Animals Opi Outhwaite
Environmental and Animal Abuse Denial: Averting Our Gaze is a timely contribution to the growing discussion of denialism in the context of animal exploitation and the global destruction of nature - the rage of inhumanity. Its interdisciplinary essays encourage readers to deconstruct taken-for-granted assumptions, practices and structures, and move toward a more compassionate and just world. -- Marc Bekoff, University of Colorado and author of The Animals' Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age This volume is a most valuable resource for facilitating awareness and understanding of the patterns of denial that serve to buttress destructive environmental policies and injustices against other animals. This powerful work should be on the bookshelf of every scholar/activist working for a nonviolent and sustainable future. -- David Nibert, Professor of Sociology, Wittenberg University
