The theory of denialism proposes that people actively avoid information that threatens their established worldviews, lifestyles, and identities. Environmental and Animal Abuse Denial: Averting Our Gaze analyzes how people use denialism to avoid awareness of climate change, environmental pollution, animal abuse, and the animal industrial complex.

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, cultural history and law.

Introduction: Introducing Denialism in Environmental and Animal Abuse

Tomaž Grušovnik, 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

Tomaž Grušovnik

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 Bjørkdahl

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 José De Giorgio-Schoorl

Chapter 11: Still in the Shadow of Man? Judicial Denialism and Nonhuman Animals

Opi Outhwaite