Original Article

Inaction and environmental crisis:

Narrative, defence mechanisms and the
social organisation of denial
Matthew Adams
School of Applied Social Sciences, University of Brighton, Brighton, BN1 9HP, UK.

Abstract The evidence that we face a catalogue of environmental crises caused by

human activities, which pose a threat to planetary, social and personal continuity, is
communicated in increasingly sophisticated ways. Despite increased knowledge, the
populaces of wealthy nations appear to be outwardly ignoring such risks, continuing
their consumption patterns unabated, and failing to mount a significant public response.
Interventions aimed at encouraging more sustainable behaviours have largely drawn on
individualistic psychology, and to date they have been largely unsuccessful. This paper is
a call to deepen and widen our understanding of the psychosocial processes involved in
not responding to the issues at stake. It does so by drawing on narrative approaches in
the social sciences, psychoanalytic conceptualisations of defence mechanisms, and
recent work addressing the social organisation of denial. The potential of these devel-
opments for informing social movements and political action is briefly considered in the
light of an example, the Dark Mountain Project.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2014) 19, 52–71. doi:10.1057/pcs.2013.21;
published online 21 November 2013

Keywords: consumerism; Dark Mountain Project; defence mechanisms; denial; social

organisation of denial; sustainability

The image that keeps coming to my mind is a nightmarish one inspired

by Edgar Allen Poe. We are all in a room with four walls, a floor, a
ceiling and no windows or door. The room is furnished and some of us
are sitting comfortably, others most definitely are not. The walls are
advancing inwards gradually … making us all more uncomfortable,
advancing all the time, threatening to crush us to death. There are
discussions within the room, but they are mostly about how to arrange
the furniture. People do not seem to see the walls advancing … As the
walls grow closer, people react in different ways. Some refuse absolutely

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www.palgrave-journals.com/pcs/
 Narrative and denial

to see the advance of the walls … defending with determination the chairs
on which they are sitting … Others … run to the walls and try desperately to
find cracks, or faults beneath the surface.
John Holloway, Crack Capitalism, 2010

Introduction

The evidence that we face a catalogue of environmental crises, which pose a

threat to planetary, social and personal continuity, grows daily. Many people
across the globe are already experiencing the consequences of those crises in their
daily lives. For those not, as yet, phenomenally associated with the fallout from
environmental crises, their reality elsewhere, and as projected into near and
medium term futures, is communicated in increasingly sophisticated ways
(Hulme, 2009). A key element of this communication is of course information
about the role of human behaviour in creating and maintaining ecological
degradation. This information is regularly combined with attempts to convince
us to change our behaviour (Monroe, 2003; Moser and Dilling, 2007; Mazur,
2011). Yet despite the communication of apocalyptic peril, the majority of
populaces of wealthy nations appear to be outwardly ignoring such risks,
continuing their consumption patterns unabated, alongside the ‘new recruits’
from rapidly developing nations (Soron, 2010). Furthermore, inaction is not
solely conceptualised as an individualised resistance to curb overconsumption,
but also as the failure of a broader ‘public response’, including ‘social move-
ment activity, behavioural changes, or public pressure on governments’
(Norgaard, 2006, p. 373); and inertia by representatives of capital and nation
states (Magadoff and Foster, 2010).
Psychology and related behavioural sciences have been drafted in, ostensibly at
least, to understand and explain this paradoxical situation and formulate
interventions that might resolve it (for example, PlanLoCal, 2013). This work
has largely relied on voluntarist, individualised, and rationalistic models of
human behaviour, with a parallel focus on attitudes, motives, intentions and
other supposedly isolatable individual variables. The solutions that flow from
such analyses emphasise increased information, economic incentives or prohibi-
tions, extended choice and the promotion of individual lifestyle change (e.g. Bord
et al, 1998; Brechin, 2003). To date, however, their impact, whether measured in
terms of changes in individual consumption patterns or a significant ‘public
response’, has been claimed to be negligible. As a result, sociologists, economists
and social psychologists increasingly question the relevance of information-
deficit and rational actor models of human behaviour and seek alternatives (e.g.
Sanne, 2002; Hobson, 2006; Lertzman, 2008; Kasper, 2009; Uzzell and Räthzel,
2009; Shove, 2010; Soron, 2010; Webb, 2012).

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This is the backdrop against which the present paper attempts to deepen and
widen our understanding of the psychosocial processes involved in not respond-
ing to the issues at stake. It does so by emphasising the importance of narrative
approaches in the social sciences and psychoanalytic conceptualisations of
defence mechanisms. In doing so, it is hoped that the discussion can make a
modest contribution to theory, understood, to complete Holloway’s opening
analogy reproduced above, ‘as part of the desperate effort to find a way out… of
the walls that are pushing us to our destruction’ (2010, p. 8). The emphasis on the
constructive power of narrative in conjunction with social psychoanalytic
mechanisms of denial is offered as a basis for understanding apparent inaction
in the face of ecological degradation. Other factors are undoubtedly involved,
and the limitations of the approach taken here are addressed in the final section.

Narrative and the Social Sciences

The centrality accorded to narrative in numerous academic disciplines

today originates in the ‘turn to narrative’ in the humanities, psychology and the
social sciences in the late twentieth century (e.g. Bruner, 1986; Sarbin, 1986;
Richardson, 1990; McAdams, 1993; Crossley, 2000). A central dilemma or
tension often figures in articulations of the psychosocial salience granted to
narrative. Stated at its simplest, on the one hand, being able to construct and
refer to a meaningfully coherent narrative is seen to be an essential ingredient in
healthy subjectivity: ‘human beings think, perceive, imagine and interact
according to narrative structures’ (Crossley, 2000, p. 532); it is the way in
which human beings impose structure on the flow of experience – the
‘organising principle of human action’ (Sarbin, 1986). Narratives allow us to
scaffold that experience in ways that are meaningful to both self and others by
providing ‘a moral, ethical, and affective framework for understanding events’
(Fivush, 2010, p. 94). More broadly it is the means through which we come to
identify ourselves meaningfully as selves, populating our internal conservations
and our individual and collective intentions. Thus, ‘to a large extent we are the
stories that we tell ourselves’ (Fivush, 2010, p. 88).
On the other hand, narrative approaches do not tend to suggest that people can
‘tell stories as they please and, in so doing, shape their lives as they see fit’
(Czarniawska-Joerges, 2004, p. 5). Culturally contingent narratives that resource
our accounts of ourselves reflect our dependency – our indebtedness to the
established narrative pegs on which we must hang our identities (Bauman, 2000,
p. 38). These frames provide the constellations by which we plot and navigate
individual but socially meaningful lives. Our experience is modulated and
contained via ‘the continuous circulation of a reassuring collective narrative’
(Berardi cited in Eden, 2012, p. 29). Narratives are ‘culturally canonical’: to take

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ontological hold they must be backed by collective cultural authority that pre-
dates us, and have sufficient validity to define the ‘culturally appropriate
narrative of a life, and the power to validate certain narratives over others’
(Fivush, 2010, p. 90).
Subsequently a tenet of critically oriented narrative approaches is that ‘to
understand a society or some part of a society, it is important to discover its
repertoire of legitimate stories and find out how it evolved’ (Czarniawska-
Joerges, 2004, p. 5). Contemporary narrative scholars thus turn their attention
to socially contingent repertoires, amassing and analysing the ‘growing evidence’
that in modern neo-liberal capitalist cultures we increasingly have a ‘life script’ in
common. This script amounts to a ‘schematised framework shared among
members of a culture for representing a typical life common across individuals’
(Fivush, 2010, p. 93), reflecting broad agreements about core events, stages and
practice that make up a ‘typical life’ (Bernsten and Rubin, 2004). Common
features of that script in western cultures have included a focus on self-mastery
and individual achievement, essentialist understandings of personality, materi-
alism and acquisitiveness, a utilitarian view of non-human nature, and a related
view of economic growth as a positive sign of progress.

Narrative, Defence Mechanisms and the Social Organisation of Denial

Recent work exploring the affective and social dynamics of defence mechanisms is
considered to be one way of transcending a preoccupation with rational decision-
making processes in sustainable behaviour and thus getting closer to a meaningful
understanding of inaction in this context (for example Norgaard, 2006, 2011;
Opotow and Weiss, 2000; Rees, 2010; Rustin, 2010). According to psychoanalytic
theory defence mechanisms are triggered by anxiety-inducing situations that require
us to confront ‘painful material’ of one kind or another – perhaps information
about ourselves or those close to us we find unpalatable (Weintrobe, 2010). Defence
mechanisms allow us to ‘deny or pretend the problem is not there, or that it is the
responsibility of someone else’ (Lertzman, 2008, p. 16). Although psychoanalytic in
origin, a range of approaches now acknowledge defence mechanisms and denial as
a fundamental psychological proclivity, grounded in perspectives ranging from
cognitive brain science to evolutionary psychology (for example Lakoff, 2010; Rees,
2010). Conceptualisations of defence mechanisms have been utilised to deepen the
psychological understanding of complex and ambivalent emotional responses in
relation to communication of environmental problems; involving both ‘deep
reservoir[s] of concern’ (Stoll-Kleemann et al, 2011, p. 107) and feelings of
helplessness, vulnerability, guilt, defiance and denial (Norgaard, 2006).
Whilst defence mechanisms have been researched ‘almost exclusively at the
individual level as a psychological phenomenon’ (Norgaard, 2006, p. 389), more

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recently there have been attempts to widen an applied understanding of denial

and other defence mechanisms, researching their social, cultural and political
dimensions (for example Cohen, 2001; Langford, 2002). A developing literature
in social and applied psychoanalysis and psychology more generally subsequently
addresses what Zerubavel termed the ‘social organisation of denial’ (Opotow
and Weiss, 2000; Norgaard, 2006, 2011; Zerubavel, 2006; Dickinson, 2009;
Hollander, 2009; Lertzman, 2012). Attention is paid to climate change denialism –
‘campaigns of misinformation about climate change, funded by commercial and
ideological interests’ (Weintrobe, 2012, p. 7), but also to everyday and uncon-
scious forms of denial (Norgaard, 2006; Opotow and Weiss, 2008; Dickinson,
2009; Stoll-Kleemann et al, 2011; Lertzman, 2012).
Norgaard’s ethnographic study of a rural community in western Norway, for
example, followed an unusually warm winter that substantially affected taken-
for-granted practices such as ice fishing and servicing the local skiing industry.
Local, national and international media coverage understood the seasonal
anomaly in terms of global warming but residents did not appear to take any
mitigating action in their private, social or political life. It is in this context that
Norgaard attended to the emotions expressed and discussed in the course of her
ethnographic work, which she argues centred on affective responses that included
helplessness, guilt and identity threats. These are unpleasant emotions, anxiety-
inducing, and are therefore a classic situation, as described above, in which
defence mechanisms might come to the fore.
Norgaard accordingly utilises a straightforward understanding of denial: when
confronted by such painful emotions, ‘we avoid thinking about them’, whilst
simultaneously shifting ‘attention to positive self-representations, and – especially
in terms of the emotion of guilt – by framing them in ways that [minimise] their
potency’ (2006, p. 384). Whilst this emotional work might be considered
subjective, its origins in communication (for example of the link between
consumer goods and ecological degradation), how we discursively frame unplea-
sant emotion, and which alternative self-representations are imaginable and
deemed suitable, depends on existing social and cultural narrative frames.
Norgaard eschews a psychologised understanding of emotions in favour of a
sociological one, following Denzin, whereby emotions, and explanations pro-
vided for feeling certain emotions, are ‘deeply embedded in and reflective of both
social structure and culture’ (2006, p. 379; Denzin, 1984). There exists a set of
‘stock’ social narratives upon which [we] draw, many of which [are] generated by
the national government and conveyed to the public through the media’ (2006,
p. 385); and these are the forms through which we process affective responses in
ways that can be articulated to self and others.
Norgaard’s reiteration of the importance of narrative frames here brings us
back into contact with the narrative approaches discussed above, which poten-
tially develop further an understanding of the interrelationship between defence
mechanisms and narrative. Norgaard provides some examples of the social stock

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used in this particular context to screen out ‘painful information about problems
for which one does not have solutions’ (2006, p. 385) and ‘to change the angle of
vision one might bring to the facts’ (2006, p. 387). These do not slavishly
reproduce master narratives framing consumerism, materialism, acquisitiveness
etc., though they do not contradict them. This alliance is not surprising if it is, in
fact, a challenge to the narratives we live by that give rise to uncomfortable
affective dynamics – we seek comfort in narrative frames that confirm, or at least
do not repudiate the narratives underpinning our ontological security. They form
the taken-for-granted backdrop to more situated narratives, though are no less
powerful by being positioned as such (Fivush, 2010).
Norgaard found the social stock drawn upon to include consistent references
to America or Americans as more serious offenders than Norwegians – what
Opotow and Weiss, in their typology of denial, refer to as ‘self-righteous
comparisons’ (2008); a minimisation of the relevance of problems to ‘us’ through
comments such as ‘Norway is only a little land’ – ‘the denial of self-involvement’
(Opotow and Weiss, 2008); and a related assertion of powerlessness (see also
Stoll-Kleemann et al, 2011, p. 112). For Norgaard then, denial in the community
she studied was affectively, subjectively meaningful because it was socially
organised. Whilst her empirical work rightly focuses on situated narrative stocks,
by drawing on insights from the narrative turn, we can further understand denial
as a psychosocial mechanism intertwined with those broader, pervasive and
canonical cultural narratives outlined above. Denial, as a socially organised and
individually experienced affective response, is the flesh on the bones of canonical
cultural narratives geared towards business-as-usual.

Splitting, Denial, and Sustainability Narratives

Other work has addressed the relationship between defence mechanisms and
narratives that explicitly frame the ‘sustainability’ agenda. Rosemary Randall’s
outline of two ‘parallel narratives’ relating to climate change discourse – one
framing the problem, the other the solutions – is an exemplary case in point
(Randall, 2009). Catastrophic loss is central to the narration of the problem, in
terms ranging from the loss of biodiversity, species, crops, water and fuel to the
potential forfeiture of livelihood, health, liberty and security (2009, p. 119).
Apocalyptic loss is terrifying, but it is simultaneously projected at a temporal and/
or spatial distance from Western audiences: ‘the consequence is that loss feels
unreal, rather like acknowledging in one’s twenties that death is inevitable. It is
not a problem for now’ (2009, p. 119). Solution narratives, on the other hand, do
not tend to acknowledge loss at all; in stark contrast to the problem of an
apocalyptic future, they present insipid and simple palliatives as solutions in the
present. Examples include ‘small steps’ – suggestions that individual lifestyle

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changes on a mass scale are sufficient to avert crisis; calls for ethical consumption
– transformation through the consumption of green products; and faith in
technology – life can go on as normal once low-carbon alternative energy
sources, forms of mobility, etc. are discovered (2009, p. 119–120).
For Randall, the coexistence of the problem and solution narratives outlined
above belies a particular form of defence mechanism originally formulated by
Melanie Klein – splitting. Anxieties regarding loss in the here and now are split
off and ‘safely’ projected onto a future scenario: a comfortable present at the
expense of a terrifying future (Randall, 2009, p. 119). In this context splitting is
mobilised to allay the fear and guilt provoked by increasingly sophisticated
communication relating to the plethora of environmental crises. Emerging
empirical and theoretical work largely supports Randall’s contention that the
narratives she identifies circulate socially, and that they are utilised by
individuals and groups in response to the discomfort they experience in relation
to ecological degradation (Norgaard, 2011; Stoll-Kleemann et al, 2011).
Although often implicit, more attention needs to be paid here to the interface
between sustainability narratives and more explicitly and ideologically orga-
nised denialism. The former may be well-meaning attempts to address environ-
mental destructive behaviour, even if their problem and solution formation ends
up, in Randall’s account, defending against genuine change. Denialism on the
other hand is a more conscious and strategic act of narrative construction:
‘a tactic of an elite-driven counter-movement designed to combat environmentalism’
(Jacques et al, 2008, p. 349). Still, Randall’s account furthers our understanding
of how narratives might ostensibly engage with the challenge posed by
increased awareness of ecological degradation, whilst disavowing the profund-
ity of that challenge for the broader narratives we live by. They are the
‘mechanisms’ through which a defence is mounted against an acknowledgment
of the uncomfortable affective responses generated by an awareness of the role
of human activity in ecological degradation.
The parallel narratives identified by Randall arguably form one important
aspect of the ‘social organisation of denial’, and go some way to extending that
analysis beyond an account of the normative narratives more obviously framing
consumerist life scripts. A focus on defence mechanisms and their psychosocial
form is arguably a necessary and important shift in psychology and social
scientific work genuinely concerned with ecological crises and human behaviour,
which has, to date, tended to address the problem as one of individualised (in-)
action. The potential solutions offered by Hollander, Norgaard, Randall and
others vary, but it is generally agreed that there is a need to confront the reality of
loss associated with ecological degradations, so that the energy currently invested
in denial can be converted into something more positive – ‘sublimated’ in
psychoanalytic terms. How such a critical consciousness and related ‘behavioural
change’ might emerge in the context of socially organised denial, and how
such organisation is underpinned by more obdurate material infrastructures, is

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sketched more hazily. As a means of exploring both the potential and limitations
of addressing the psychosocial dynamics of narrative and denial a little further,
the remainder of this paper will look to a recent social phenomenon addressing
those selfsame issues.

The Dark Mountain Project

The Dark Mountain Project is a network of individuals aiming to challenge

predominant cultural responses to environmental crisis.1 It was set up in 2009 by
two British writers, Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, and has since gained
many additional members from across the globe, including philosophers,
psychologists, economists, artists and poets. The starting point for the Dark
Mountain Project was the publication of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain
Manifesto (Kingsnorth and Hine, 2009). The manifesto and a related set of
principles have been followed by four volumes of essays, stories, poetry and
interviews authored by an international collection of ‘mountaineers’ (Kingsnorth
and Hine, 2010, 2011b, 2013; Hine et al, 2012), annual festivals, and various
related online and in-print forums and debates (for example McIntosh, 2010).
Meanwhile the Dark Mountain website collates various associated blogs and is
the platform for a growing network of ‘mountaineers’.
‘Uncivilisation’ itself is defined as a method rather than a place, goal, ideal or
political position, a process ‘of unlearning the assumptions, the founding
narratives, of our civilisation’ (Kingsnorth and Hine, 2011b, p. 3). Subsequent
writing reflects the overriding preoccupation of the Dark Mountain Project – the
narrative framing of ecological degradation and the human-nonhuman nature
relationship. Narrative is generally interchangeable with ‘stories’ and ‘storytelling’.
It is utilised in different ways across the Project’s output, but is mostly grounded in
a shared understanding of the fundamental importance of narrative for meaningful
human life. The Uncivilisation Manifesto thus establishes narrative as socially and
psychologically foundational: ‘the role of story-telling [is] more than mere
entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality’ (Kingsnorth and Hine,
2009). The Manifesto, and later writers associated with the Project, such as Naomi
Klein (2011) and David Abram (Abram and Hine, 2011), explicitly identify
environmental crises in contemporary global society in terms of the narrative
frames that support their continuation: ‘We believe that the roots of these crises lie
in the stories we have been telling ourselves … the myth of progress, the myth of
human centrality, and the myth of our separation from “nature”’ (Kingsnorth and
Hine, 2009); our culture ‘remains in the grip of … our real master narrative:
however much we mess up, there will always be more’ (Klein, 2011, p. 23).
More specifically, two narratives framing how we understand and respond to
ecological degradation resulting from human behaviour are identified in a clear
echo of Randall’s analysis (Kingsnorth and Hine, 2010). It is argued that there is

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a tendency on the one hand towards a reiteration of the general myth of progress
in ‘business-as-usual’ framing of how to respond to environmental crisis,
epitomised in the corporate and state co-opted sustainability agenda (Randall’s
solution narrative). Business-as-usual narratives pin their hopes on technological
fixes that will allow us (that is the relatively wealthy) to continue our lives more-or-
less as we do now, lives informed by the broader narrative of progress. On the other
hand ‘apocalyptic anti-futures’ posit total destruction and annihilation in the near
or distant future (Randall’s problem narrative). These are stories of imminent
destruction to familiar ways of life, as brutally depicted in Cormac McCarthy’s
novel The Road (2007). Although such narratives offer warnings, and offer some
form of a challenge to existing ways of life, Kingsnorth and Hine argue that they
hold no radical promise today. In fact they are claimed to feed into the sense that
current ways of life are the only ones imaginable; beyond the narrative framing of
the present there are only unliveable anti-futures (Kingsnorth and Hine, 2010, p. 3).
In their manifesto, and in the more varied writing and artistic projects that
make up the Project’s output to date, the relationship between sustainability and
narrative is a common thread, often intertwined with an acknowledgment of the
dynamics of denial. Canonical cultural narratives are thus understood to obscure
more fundamental material relationships, primarily the role of human behaviour in
irreversible ecological degradation. We find ourselves trapped in a ‘narrative loop’
of denial (Klein, 2011), whilst heading towards ‘the worst kind of encounter with
reality’ (Kingsnorth and Hine, 2009, p. 11). The authors problematise ‘business-as-
usual’ and ‘apocalyptic anti-future’ teleological narratives, because, they assert,
both circumscribe practical and imaginative responses that might genuinely
unsettle dominant narratives. Together they validate the deceptive claim ‘that life
without the components of our current way of living is simply unlivable. That the
future will give us either unbroken progress or apocalypse, and there are no spaces
between’ (2010, p. 3). Kingsnorth and Hine claim that such dichotomous thinking
is common but unhelpful, and it is ‘the gap in our cultural imagination’ where
‘our real future is likely to be played out’ (2010, p. 3).
Controversially, the Project’s tenets include an acceptance of the end of
‘civilisation’, which is claimed to be already underway, and a commitment to
work on alternative ways of life – ‘when something is falling, the best move is
often to get out of the way’ (Kingsnorth and Hine, 2010, p. 3); and a related
acknowledgment of human dependency – we must ‘give up control and the
illusion of control’ (Kingsnorth and Hine, 2011a, b, p. 3). Civilisation is under-
stood in terms of global capitalism, with an emphasis on the narrative forms and
‘myths’ that support it: ‘Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is the
story of an empire corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed,
for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences. It is the story of how
that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth’ (Kingsnorth and
Hine, 2009). Whilst the contemporaneous collapse of civilisation will continue,
by clearing a space between dichotomous narratives identified above, genuinely

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new cultural narratives can emerge and flourish, an assertion exemplified in the
final ‘principle of uncivilisation’: ‘The end of the world as we know it is not the
end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths
which lead to the unknown world ahead of us... It is time to pick up the threads
and make the stories new, as they must always be made new, starting from where
we are’ (Kingsnorth and Hine, 2009, p. 12).
In a sense the Dark Mountain Project is occupying the space between Randall’s
discredited ‘parallel narratives’, establishing ‘a base camp in the foothills of some
dark and uncharted range’ (Kingsnorth and Hine, 2010, p. 3) as a starting point
for generating alternative and meaningful stories. A remaining question is how
effective the Project is in beginning to map this territory, to provide narratives that
offer a way forward. If we focus on the four volumes of writing published to date
(Kingsnorth and Hine, 2010, 2011a, b, 2013; Hine et al, 2012), we find over-
lapping attempts to challenge existing narrative frames, alongside an associated
historical revisionism, and attempts to provide a platform for both recovered and
new narrative frames. The Project gathers an impressive array of voices to contest
canonical cultural narratives in its art, writing, interviews and events to date, such
as a reassessment of ‘the tragedy of the commons’ (Fairlie, 2010); an alternative
history of barbarian and pastoral nomad culture (Rao, 2011); and a critique of the
distinction between civilised and primitive (Prieur, 2010). Poetry, fiction, painting
and illustration are also used to question and disrupt what are considered to be
taken-for-granted assumptions and routinely hidden realities. As Draper asserts in
his revisionist history of the Luddites, the aim here is to undermine ‘propagandist
narratives … which help underpin our civilisation’s view of the world and itself’
(Draper, 2011, p. 131).
At other times we are invited to hear older voices that might have been lost or
misplaced. The range here is broad and eclectic across the four volumes, and
includes art, poetry and prose, advocacy and engagement with a range of voices
such as John Berger, Ronnie Laing, David Abram, Naomi Klein and Ursula Le
Guin. Defending against accusations of romanticism and a ‘desire to rewind’,
Hine, in conversation with Sajay Samuel, asserts that a turn to commonly hidden
or obscured narratives is about ‘recognising the moment when something from
further back in the story weaves in and provides the next move, as you’re
stumbling into the unknown’ (Hine and Samuel, 2012, p. 105). Critique and
recovery are intertwined, often inseparably, with attempts to present new nar-
ratives and advocate associated practices. The ‘newness’ is sometimes harder to
discern here. There are glimpses of it, for example in the poetry of Keegan
Walker, where nature appreciation is oddly but evocatively grounded in everyday
life and intimate relationships (2011); in Gupta’s challenge to contemplate death
unflinchingly in shared and meaningful ways (Gupta, 2011); or in Hunt’s sparse
poetic evocation of loss (Hunt, 2010).
If the contribution of ‘psychoanalytic observers’ to socially organised denial
‘should be to track these unconscious structures of feeling (including their

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presence in their own minds) and to bring these sentient dimensions into public
debate’ (Rustin, 2010, p. 478), then the Project’s relentless pursuit of narrative
frames as mechanisms for denying troubling realities provides a parallel service,
potentially reaching different audiences. Similarly, if Randall is correct in
asserting that ‘we need to create support structures that facilitate the process
of mourning and provide containment for the anxieties that will inevitably
be revealed … and a culture of stories and role-models that offers meaningful
examples to identify with’ (Randall, 2009, p. 126), then the Dark Mountain
project makes a meaningful if modest contribution to that strategy.
It is undoubtedly easier to ask, however, ‘what does it mean to inhabit a life
that is outside of these frames’? (Hine and Samuel, 2012, p. 96) than it is to
articulate an alternative. Indeed it is because human-nonhuman coexistence is
understood to exceed what can be easily described within contemporary
narrative frames that art and poetry are valued as effective narrative forms.
We should not be too dismissive of the Project on this point perhaps, as there
has been some poignant recognition of the difficulties posed in this regard, in
arguments about the current difficulties in imagining and realising an alter-
native to consumer capitalism. As noted by Kidner (2001), attempts to
articulate alternative frameworks of meaning from within a system that has
based its longevity on a colonisation of such frameworks are likely to be
opaque because of their ‘ideological occlusion’. The possibility of resistance is
ever present, but it is difficult to narrate, ‘a shadowy figure’ (Eden, 2012,
p. 33). It is in this context that Holloway (2010) describes instances of rebellion
as ‘cracks’ and Eden (2012, p. 33) speaks of ‘moments of creation and dis-
obedience’ rather than clearly articulated identity positions.

Criticism of the Dark Mountain Project

Does the Dark Mountain Project mount a viable challenge to canonical cultural
narratives and socially organised denial, in deconstructing myth, confronting
reality and reconstructing narrative frames? According to its founders the
Manifesto has inspired and motivated people across the globe to converse,
congregate and rethink the narratives that guide us (Kingsnorth, 2010). How-
ever, the Project has also been met with plenty of criticism and cynicism, not only
from expected sources such as right-wing blogs (Worstall, 2010), but also from
environmentalists (for example Kingsnorth and Monbiot, 2009; Gray, 2010;
McIntosh, 2010; Monbiot, 2010; Townsend, 2010). Paul Hoggett’s (2011)
recent paper in this journal is notable in that, to this author’s knowledge, it is
the first to pay the Dark Mountain Project any academic attention.
Hoggett discerns in the Dark Mountain Project despair and withdrawal: ‘some
former activists have already abandoned hope and seem to be engaged in the

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same kind of retreat, something exemplified by the Dark Mountain Project’

(2011, p. 265). He is scathing in his criticism of the Project, which is a focal point
in his broader analysis of ‘apocalyptic responses’ to climate change in some
strands of environmentalism. In these responses Hoggett sees echoes of the
‘apocalyptic survivalism’ Lasch observed in The Minimal Self (1984). This
form of survivalism combines contempt towards individuals or groups who
think there is still time to act, to save or protect civilisation, with pronounce-
ments on what social phenomenona can and should outlive the forthcoming
apocalypse and flourish on the other side (Hoggett, 2011, p. 268). It is built on
the contention ‘that a saving remnant will survive the end of the world and
build a better one’ (Lasch, 1984, p. 83). For Hoggett, the ‘conceit and
superiority of this stance is not hard to spot’ (2011, p. 268); it is one he readily
associates with the ‘apparent’ radicalism of the Dark Mountain Project (2011,
p. 272). Thus, in his view, the members of the Project ‘have already abandoned
hope and seem to be engaged in the same kind of retreat’ (2011, p. 265) and
believe that they ‘have the foresight to prepare for the worst and the moral
fibre to prevail’ (2011, p. 268) – reflecting common criticism of the Project in
the debates cited above. Hoggett cites the following passage as evidence of
survivalist writing, a genre in which ‘the idea that they, unlike the rest of us,
are facing reality is a recurring motif’ (Hoggett, 2011, p. 266):

We are facing the end of the world as we know it; but this is not the same
thing as the end of the world. The decline or stuttering collapse of a
civilisation, a way of life, is not the same thing as an apocalypse. It is simply
a reality of history. The Dark Mountain Project, in other words, is not
concerned with fantasising about catastrophe. It is concerned with being
honest about reality; something which most of us, as human beings, find
painfully hard. (Kingsnorth and Hine, 2010, pp. 3–4)

Hoggett also argues that the clinical term ‘catastrophism’ also applies here,
evident in ‘announcing the end of the world as we know it’ (2011, p. 271), and
in more clinical terms as ‘a temporary or sometimes recurring difficulty in
getting things in perspective or proportion… slights, setbacks problems, and
the like are perceived as overwhelming and threatening catastrophe’ (2011,
p. 271). He argues that environmentalists drawing on narratives of catastroph-
ism and survivalism tend to overstate the threat of climate change whilst
understating our ability to respond effectively. The Project’s tenets are here
interpreted as a particularly dangerous blend of catastrophism and apo-
calyptic survivalism, and forthrightly dismissed. Hoggett’s conclusion is that
such responses to climate change and related environmental crises are not a
viable alternative to complacency, for survivalism and catastrophism are
‘demoralised state[s] of mind’ susceptible to authoritarianism, condescension
and conceit.

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 Adams

Hoggett quotes Kingsnorth and Hine’s editorial comments in the process of

criticising their apocalyptic vision (Hoggett, 2011, pp. 265–266), but draws on
that text, other contributions to the volume, and the manifesto rather selectively.
A number of contributions playfully discredit ‘survivalist wisdom’ (for example
Rember, 2011; Smith, 2011). Also, as noted above, the combination of critique,
recovered and emerging narratives reflects a sustained and varied engagement
with human (in)action much more than it does any kind of retreat. There is also
some irony in Hoggett’s accusation that the Dark Mountain project is guilty of
arrogance and ‘catastrophising’ by encouraging us to accept the situation we find
ourselves in more openly. Confronting reality is exactly what many other
psychoanalytically oriented theorists and practitioners have identified as the first
tentative, but necessary, step towards significant change (for example, Rustin
2010; Hollander, 2009). For Randall it is the denial of the actuality, seriousness,
meaning and irreversibility of loss that is the maladaptive response to environ-
mental crises (2009, p. 122).
The Dark Mountain Project reflects a rough working application of how
narrative frames, defence mechanisms and their interrelationship in the social
organisation of denial might be formulated as a force maintaining human
inaction in the face of environmental crises; in doing so, they represent more
than the survivalist narrative to which Hoggett reduces them. This is not to say
that the Dark Mountain Project should be exempt from criticism. Whilst the
Project reflects how an emphasis on narrative and denial deepens and widens our
account of the psychosocial processes involved in not responding to the issues at
stake, it also mirrors the limitations of doing so.

Developing a Psychosocial Account Further

There is a powerful logic to the aforementioned combination: that communica-

tion regarding our role in ecological degradation generates uncomfortable
affective responses as it simultaneously challenges the narratives we live by and
our identification with them; that this discomfort triggers defence mechanisms,
such as splitting and projection; that such mechanisms take narrative forms that
creatively reflect socially organised and culturally canonical ways of framing our
response (including the assiduous promotion of denialism), which, in turn
maintain, reinforce, or at least blunt any challenge to those narratives we live by
and associated feelings of responsibility, entitlement and ontological security. An
exploration of the value of combining narrative approaches with an emphasis on
defence mechanisms and their social organisation is not exhausted by our brief
consideration of the Dark Mountain Project. The potential of this combination
depends on its further development. On the one hand, narrative approaches can
utilise conceptualisations of affective and unconscious dynamics, such as those

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found in accounts of a ‘narrative unconscious’ (Freeman, 2012; Frie, 2012). On

the other hand, mining the complexity of the narrative turn and its recent
incarnations can help develop contemporary accounts of denial and defence
mechanisms. However, the potential of this union also depends on further
development beyond its combined powers, the possible direction of which can
only be sketched here.
Firstly, the intricacies of how defence mechanisms are socially organised
requires further explanation of affective and social processes. Even in contem-
porary literature that draws more explicitly on psychoanalysis (e.g. Weintrobe,
2012), the interpersonal and organisational complexity involved is yet to be
examined in the kinds of detail offered by an earlier generation of psychoanalysts
(Bion, 1952; Jaques, 1955, 1953; Menzies Lyth, 1960). In this work the social
organisation of defence mechanisms was of paramount concern for advancing
our understanding of the nature of life in all manner of social institutions. With
the exception of Bion, this work is also rarely cited in contemporary accounts of
the social organisation of denial in relation to sustainability. It has much
relevance nonetheless, both in its emphasis on resistance to social change, and in
the typology of defensive techniques discovered in empirical work. Jaques, for
example, details how mechanisms such as splitting and projection create shared
external objects with others (1953, p. 425). Projective identifications with
common objects ‘are [then] further elaborated by introjection; and the two-way
character of social relationships is mediated by virtue of the two-way play of
projective and introjective identification’ (Jaques, 1953, p. 425). Similarly for
Menzies Lyth a ‘mutual collusive agreement’ and ‘projection system’ are at the
heart of socially structured defence mechanisms, generated in an ongoing and
constantly modifiable dialectic between projection into social defence systems and
introjection of that system into the psychic defence system (Menzies Lyth, 1960).
It remains to be seen how far their analyses of specific institutions can be applied
to broader cultural dynamics; Jaques’s approach, in particular, seems appropriate
to an analysis of the anxieties and defences arising in relation to the prospect of
profound social change generated by the communication of ecological crisis.
Secondly, there is a danger of advancing a reductive epistemology in over-
emphasising the importance of narrative – both in academic work and broader
developments in the environmental movement such as the Dark Mountain
Project. For life scripts to have a normative claim on us, they must be understood
as reciprocally constituted in spatial and material power relations, structurally
organised and embodied in non-discursive forms. There is clearly a need to
incorporate a broader grasp of what we might include in the psychosocial: the
material structure of everyday lives that underpins and makes (im)possible the
pursuit of particular narrative framings of, and ontological identifications with,
the human-nonhuman nature relationship and associated destructive and sus-
tainable behaviours (Uzzell and Räthzel, 2009; Shove, 2010). Again, theoretical
and empirical work is emerging that further contributes to what we understand

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 Adams

to be at the heart of our failure to mount a significant public response to

ecological degradation. One example we must consider lies in the assertion that
the organisation of denial has a primary spatial dimension. The material causes and
consequences of consumer capitalism, their impact on human societies, individuals,
human and non-human nature and their interrelationship are structured in globa-
lised spatial terms. This organisation is exemplified in the rupture of production and
consumption ‘feedback loops’ that disassociate individuals ‘from the environmental
consequences of their production and consumption decisions’ (Hudson and Hudson,
2003, p. 418). It allows some, but not all, of us to deny the effects of ecological
degradation in our routine and everyday material existence (Worthy, 2008), in what
might tentatively be referred to as the socio-spatial organisation of denial. Various
movements demanding or providing greater transparency in the chains linking
production to consumption mobilise an understanding of these dynamics to different
degrees.2 It is vital to understand these practices in conjunction with related affective
and social processes. They pose questions for movements such as the Dark Mountain
Project that emphasise storytelling and denial without due regard for the material
and spatial structures through which they are realised.

Conclusion

This discussion calls for a deepening and widening of our understanding of the
psychology of sustainable consumption and pro-environmental behaviour and
associated barriers. In deepening that analysis, defence mechanisms are seen to be
an important way of approaching the emotional complexity and inconsistency of
apparent inaction in the context of increasingly sophisticated communication
about ecological degradation and the contributing role of human behaviour.
In widening our analysis, the discussion has pointed to accounts of the social
organisation of denial. Here narrative frames, denial and other defence mechan-
isms are constructed as social psychological processes, operating at the level of
individual and intersubjective experience, and ordered and promulgated socially
and interpersonally.
The Dark Mountain Project provides an interesting example of a collection of
people articulating the hold that canonical narratives have over our sense of self
and social relations, the extent of our denial over our role in environmental crisis,
and attempting to formulate, however imperfectly, an alternative. Vitally, it also
problematises existing narratives of apocalyptic anti-futures and business-
as-usual technological fixes that dominate mainstream environmentalist dis-
course and shape individual responses. Whilst its potential is uncertain, and its
arguments controversial and flawed, existing criticism seems to have overlooked
the positive engagement it represents. In addition the Project takes a standpoint
that is partially and implicitly supported by contemporary work in applied

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 Narrative and denial

psychoanalysis and related theory and research in the social sciences. However,
as a movement it inevitably fails to capture the multiplicity and interrelationship
of obstacles in the path of enlightened sustainable behaviour in its account of
problem and solution.
In this paper it has been claimed that narrative frames are an important
dimension of the social organisation of denial. Narratives are understood to be a
universal and fundamental vehicle through which human life is made mean-
ingful; yet, narrative forms rely on indexical, historically contingent social
norms and established power relationships that force and facilitate identities
into particular shapes. In contemporary consumer societies, canonical cultural
narratives, including, importantly, those articulating environmental problems
and sustainability, play a key role in organising denial. They provide us with
culturally validated opportunities to minimise loss or project it into the future,
blame others or project responsibility onto them; and encourage us to consider
consumerist lifestyles as a potential solution to ecological degradation. Stanley
Cohen recently asserted, in discussing climate change specifically, that ‘a
working conception of denial … should make sense in both psychological/
individual and social/collective terms’ (2012, p. 73). Partnering narrative
approaches with social psychoanalytic accounts of denial is not a tidy coupling,
but it does offer the potential for a further deepening and widening of existing
accounts of ‘sustainable consumption’, beyond individualised or thinly socia-
lised models of information-deficient rational actors.

About the Author

Matthew Adams is a Principal Lecturer in the School of Applied Social Sciences at

the University of Brighton. He is currently working with colleagues at Brighton in
developing a psychosocial approach to the sustainability and pro-environmental
behaviour agenda, and on a monograph for Palgrave provisionally titled Voice,
Narrative and Resistance: Subjectivity and the Limits of Language. He has
published widely on the themes of social change, subjectivity, reflexivity, class,
consumption and culture.

Notes

1 The term ‘Dark Mountain’ is taken from the final lines of the poem Rearmament (1935), by the late
American environmentalist poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962). The poem ends: ‘To change the
future... I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern/ Man is not in the persons but in the/Disastrous
rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the/Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.’
The poem is available in full at: www.poemhunter.com/poem/rearmament/.
2 See for example the Story of Stuff at: www.storyofstuff.org; Follow the things at: www.followthethings
.com/; Slavery Footprint at http://slaveryfootprint.org/.

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 Adams

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