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KARI MARIE NORGAARD Interview by John Gibbons A few minutes into Dr Kari Marie Norgaard’s recent lecture in Trinity College, Dublin, she ran a short animation showing the steady ratcheting up of global surface temperatures over time. The clip began in 1950. By the time it had reached 2014 the globe graphic was heavily pock-marked by pink blotches. From there, it quickly ran through the remaining years using climate model projections until 2100. An intense silence fell over the lecture hall as the years advanced and the graphic melded into what looked like a global firestorm. Who knows what the end of the world will look like, but this certainly looked like the end of our world being played out in stop-motion before a stunned audience. Understated and self-effacing, Kari Norgaard is an improbable prophet of the apocalypse. Assistant professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of Oregon, she is best known for her critically acclaimed 2011 book, ‘Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life’. A third-generation Norwegian-American, Norgaard chose her ancestral homeland as the ideal place to carry out extensive field work on the phenomenon of how we internalise denial of the dire implications of climate change. Awareness of climate change constitutes what she calls “background noise” in most of our lives – paradoxically, it is both deeply disturbing and almost completely invisible, “it is simultaneously unimaginable and common knowledge”, she explains. Failure to grasp or address climate change is often blamed on poverty, poor quality of education, political disengagement or strong ideological opposition (as in the US). Norway suffers none of these disadvantages, yet its public has internalised denial as comprehensively as anywhere else. Knowing and not knowing, understanding and yet ignoring climate change involves us in what has been described as “the absurdity of the double life”. In her book, Norgaard tracks what she describes as socially organised denial through its multiple strands, including emotions, cultural norms and politics. What this means is that, although knowledge and information about climate change is widely available, these insights are completely disconnected from how political, social and even private lives are organised. It is, she argues, everywhere, yet nowhere. “We humans are now modifying Earth systems; these are accelerating out of control, in terms of ocean acidification, carbon dioxide build-up, sea level rise – all of these associated phenomena that come with the greenhouse effect”, Norgaard told Village in an in-depth interview: “On my way here, I flew over two very large wildfires in the state of California – the state is in extreme drought right now. While the effects of climate change are becoming ever more manifest, these are occurring unevenly and unpredictably in different parts of the world. Climate change poses a threat to our ideas of modern progress, our ideas of the good life and what’s attainable, of our fossil-fuel-driven economic systems that are organised around growth. Also, our political structures, we haven’t been able to come together and respond, and find agreement on these things. It also poses threats to people’s individual identity as ‘good’ people…when you have a really big threat and there’s no clear sense of what can be done without having huge change – people don’t, either individually or as a collective, say ‘fine, I’ll change my mind’ – it doesn’t work that way. One of the most powerful theories in psychology is of cognitive dissonance, the idea that, with climate change, everything we’ve been doing and holding in our lives is not working any more is completely in contrast not only with what we’ve been taught to believe, but also what we see in the culture around us. This is the kind of denial that is my work”. The culture in which we all operate has, she adds, “been created by dominant elites – there’s a sense of abundance (created by advertising) and ‘buy, buy, buy’ – this cultural messaging is produced by entities that are invested in the status quo…our whole idea of progress, ever since the Enlightenment, that we could use science to have a better world, that we could come together to resolve our mutual differences, while science guides us to a better future – all our ideas of modernity, that life will get better and better; that has come to an end in terms of the degree of impact that we now have on the Earth’s ecosystem, which is unravelling”. Norgaard identifies a key flaw in post-Enlightenment reasoning that placed humanity over nature, in a position of dominance rather than dependence and reverence, as was common in many pre-industrial societies. Nature was re-framed from being a powerful but largely benevolent parental figure to an undefended trove of treasures, a bottomless quarry from which we can extract an infinity of goods to satisfy our infinitely expanding needs. Scottish engineer and inventor, James Watt put it presciently when he said: “Nature can be conquered, if we can but find her weak side”. While the recent WWF ‘Living Planet’ report tracked a chilling decline in biological diversity and abundance, even its utterly shocking headline numbers seem to have failed to put a dent in public consciousness. Why? “Here in Dublin, people who are urban especially, they live in a very mediated environment – they may never have seen those particular species”. Many New Yorkers were shaken from their urban insulation two years ago when Hurricane Sandy slammed into the city, but this was exceptional. Mostly, says Norgaard, “it’s almost like we live in gated communities, and our media sources could be seen as another level of that gate. Similarly, the kinds of conversations people have around you can form a kind of gate that keeps out (unpleasant ecological) information”. She believes that, despite the best efforts of the corporatised media, the sheer number and intensity of extreme weather events sweeping the continental US is beginning to really break into standard conversation. “That filter, the one that says no one else really cares about this, it mustn’t

“In conclusion, for the period up to 2013, there was an inadequate framework at EU and Member State level to translate the EU’s objectives for the sustainable development of aquaculture into reality and the measures actually taken did not provide sufficient results”. – Kevin Cardiff ‘The effectiveness of European Fisheries Fund support for aquaculture’   By Tony Lowes Surprisingly, Kevin Cardiff, the controversial Irish Government appointment to the Court of Auditors, is garnering the respect of seasoned Brussels watchers. Cardiff resigned as Secretary General of the Department of Finance and alternate governor of the World Bank, in February 2012 to take up the Brussels post. Cardiff’s elevation raised strenuous objections from those who saw his role in the disastrous 2008 bank guarantee – and an accounting error of 12.3 billion in 2012, as disqualifying him for anything other than early retirement. Ironically, his first report for the Court of Auditors addressed the fact that the level of trust and confidence in our rulers – in this case the European Union – has plummeted. Eurobarometer polls show that citizens who trust the European Union have fallen from 50% in 2004 to 31% in 2013. Cardiff’s initial report led to twitching eyebrows, given his opaque appearances in Irish inquires to date about the events of October 2008. Entitled a ‘Landscape review: Gaps, overlaps and challenges: a landscape review of EU accountability and public audit arrangements’, he calls on the Member states “to re-think public accountability and audit within the EU to improve its financial accountability towards citizens”. His second report is a damning study entitled ‘The effectiveness of European Fisheries Fund support for aquaculture’. Not surprisingly, this was hailed with silence from the Irish government, and remains unreported by the Irish Times. In spite of more than €438 million in EU funding, the aquaculture industry’s 2011 production is lower than it was ten years previously, while worldwide production has doubled. While the report did not specifically examine Ireland, the key conclusions do apply here: •Measures to support the sustainable development of aquaculture have not always been well designed and monitored at EU level •The Commission’s review of national strategic plans and operational programmes did not systematically ensure that they were designed to maximise the effectiveness of aquaculture policy •The Commission did not provide comprehensive aquaculture-related guidance on environmental matters •There were few relevant audits and evaluations by the Commission, and limited monitoring “Environmental and health risks were not considered sufficiently in funding decisions for aquaculture”, Cardiff said, calling on the Commission ”to establish guidelines for the consideration of relevant environmental facts when determining public funding”. Cardiff echoed his fellow auditor in Norway, the world’s largest producer of farmed salmon. Jørgen Kosmo’s report from 2012 had concluded: “The aquaculture industry is facing significant environmental challenges, among other things in the form of high figures for escaped fish, salmon lice and extensive losses due to disease. The extent of these and other environmental challenges is so great that it is necessary to strengthen the management of aquaculture in order to ensure environmental sustainability and the possibility of future growth in the industry”. Irish state support for salmon farms was detailed in an unpublished 2011 SalmonWatch Ireland Report which showed that more than €57 million (index-llinked) in state aid had gone to fish farms that had gone under from disease, parasites, and other biological challenges. A complaint before the Competition Commissionership at the moment records that 30% of the funding from Europe intended for indigenous small to medium enterprises was split between Bord Iascaigh Mhara – a State agency,  and Marine Harvest – the multi-national salmon-farmers which now controls 80% of Ireland’s salmon farms and last year lost €6.7 million here because of ‘biological challenges’. Rather than taking up the gauntlet that Cardiff offered to “provide comprehensive aqua culture-related guidance on environmental matters”, the Environmental Directorate who are responsible for addressing the ‘environmental challenges’, recently (19 September, 2014) closed its ‘Pilot’ and ‘Chap’ investigations into salmon-farming in Ireland. The evidence provided did not demonstrate that “the particular SACs designated for wild Atlantic salmon do not meet their conservations objectives”, that the “scientific debate is not closed”, and that in fact “there is no legal basis under EU law for requiring a general moratorium on salmon farm development”. The decision is a serious blow to the opponents of the proposed Galway Bay 15,000-tonne salmon farm and the environmental groups who had the complaint reopened after its initial closure in 2012. It is also entirely contrary to the overwhelming international scientific consensus. Ironically, on almost the same day that the Commission gave Ireland the green light for Minister Coveney’s aggressive plans to build nine super farms along the coast, a major study by ten top international scientists of more than 300 published papers on the subject left no doubt about the adverse impact of salmon-farming along our coasts. It concluded that “sea lice have negatively impacted wild sea trout stocks in salmon farming areas in Ireland, Scotland and Norway” and that the lice have “a potential significant and detrimental effect on marine survival of Atlantic salmon with potentially 12-44% fewer salmon spawning in salmon farming areas”. Come home, Kevin Cardiff, reinvented.