‘Its All Folded into Normalcy’: Narratives and Inaction

Abstract

Cultural narratives and framings of ecological degradation and related practice clearly play a part in the social organisation of denial as described in the previous chapter. In this chapter the narrative framing of ‘environmental problems’, together with the academic attention that the communication of these problems has increasingly garnered, is explored in more detail. This chapter explores further interdisciplinary work focusing on how framings—understood variously as narratives, discourses and stocks of knowledge circulate and supposedly infuse personal and social understandings of the nature of ecological crisis and how to respond, alongside work advocating the fundamental importance of narrative in meaningful human life. This is a disparate body of work, and the key task in this chapter is to establish connections between psychosocial accounts of collectively organised defence mechanisms short on detail when it comes to the particular discourses centrally involved, and work highlighting dominant discourses less clear on the ways in which they are circulated, legitimised and, at least potentially, challenged.