Denial and the Process of Moral Exclusion in Environmental Conflict

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 2000 by Susan Opotow, Leah Weiss

Susan Opotow [*]

Environmental issues present an urgent challenge throughout the world. Air, water, and land pollution continue at alarming rates and increasingly strain the Earth's capacity to sustain healthy ecosystems and human life. Although technological and behavioral aspects of environmental conflict are often salient, this article contributes to the literature on environmentalism by examining moral orientations that underlie and fuel environmental conflict. The centerpiece of this article describes three kinds of denial in environmental conflict: (1) outcome severity; (2) stakeholder inclusion; and (3) self-involvement. Like intermeshed gears, these forms of denial actively advance the process of moral exclusion. The article concludes with implications of this analysis for theory and practice.

Environmental issues present an urgent challenge throughout the world. Air, water, and land pollution continue at alarming rates and increasingly strain the Earth's capacity to sustain healthy ecosystems and human life. Although marked improvements in environmental quality have been documented in the United States for certain pollutants, additional questions, concerns, and conflicts continue to arise over the current state of the environment locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. For example, pedestrians and bus drivers dispute the prolonged idling of diesel engines in downtown business districts; a neighborhood challenges a proposed siting for an incinerator or power plant; the U.S. Environmental

Protection Agency battles industry groups over appropriate quality standards; and around the world, nations that were parties to the 1997 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Kyoto, Japan, struggle with marketplace forces to lower emissions of greenhouse gases.

Although technological and behavioral aspects of environmental conflict are often salient, this article describes subtle moral orientations that underlie the process of environmental conflict (cf. Clayton & Opotow, 1994). It offers an analysis of three forms of denial, discussing each in the context of air quality conflicts. These forms of denial advance self-serving moral justifications, exclusionary attitudes, structural change in the conflict, conflict escalation, and destructive conflict outcomes. Understanding environmental conflict, moral exclusion, and the contribution of denial to both is crucial for constructively managing conflict process.

Environmental Conflict

Conflicts result from behavioral or attitudinal incompatibilities as parties bring distinctive worldviews to conflicts that include their interests, positions, culture, beliefs, tactics, skills, needs, values, and perceptions of fairness (Deutsch, 1973). Conflicts can be obvious or hidden, constructive or destructive, and occur at smaller and larger contexts, from within individuals to international conflicts. Conflicts are often precipated by as well as precipate changes that include modifications in positions and attitudes, enlarging or narrowing of issues, and the mix of engaged stakeholders (Mather & Yngvesson, 1980-81). Morton Deutsch (1973) has identified the influential relationship between conflict processes and conflict outcomes. He proposes that positive conflict processes, such as cooperation, promote constructive conflict outcomes, whereas negative conflict processes, such as disrespect, distrust, and miscommunication, promote destructive conflict outcomes. Although all conflicts share these char acteristics, environmental conflicts as a class have some distinctive characteristics. Promoting environmentalism--an environmentally protective stance and behavior--depends on an understanding of environmental conflict.

Large Scale

Environmental conflicts are unusually large scale and complex. They involve large numbers of people (often millions). These human stakeholders can differ substantially from each other in perceptions of risk, time horizons, and value and as well as in their access to power and political and economic resources (Susskind, 1981). Environmental conflicts involve complex systems that include regulatory bodies, proximate and distal parties, individuals and groups, and future stakeholders. In addition they involve nonhuman natural systems that remain incompletely understood (Susskind & Field, 1996). Because of the large numbers and diversity of human and nonhuman animate and inanimate stakeholders (e.g., rivers, etc.), environmental conflicts are often representation disputes debating who should be identified as valid spokespersons for specific positions and interests.

The Commons

Environmental conflicts concern shared resources (e.g., the watershed, the air, land use) and harms (e.g., pollution), evoking the dynamic of the commons. Garrett Hardin (1968) describes how shared space lends itself to environmental tragedy when the costs of overutilization accrue at the macro level but not the micro level. Adding sheep to the common benefits an individual sheep owner, but when widely adopted as a practice, leads to overgrazing and degradation of the common.