“We live in one way, and we think in another. We learn to think in parallel. It’s a skill, an art of living.”

Dr Kari Marie Norgaard drills down into why people with knowledge about the devastating effects of climate change often fail to act on that knowledge. This article, published on The MIT Press Reader, is excerpted from Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. Dr Norgaard teaches sociology at the University of Oregon.