An analysis of why people with knowledge about climate change often fail to translate that knowledge into action. Global warming is the most significant environmental issue of our time, yet public response in Western nations has been meager. Why have so few taken any action? In Living in Denial, sociologist Kari Norgaard searches for answers to this question, drawing on interviews and ethnographic data from her study of "Bygdaby," the fictional name of an actual rural community in western Norway, during the unusually warm winter of 2000-2001. In 2000-2001 the first snowfall came to Bygdaby two months later than usual; ice fishing was impossible; and the ski industry had to invest substantially in artificial snow-making. Stories in local and national newspapers linked the warm winter explicitly to global warming. Yet residents did not write letters to the editor, pressure politicians, or cut down on use of fossil fuels. Norgaard attributes this lack of response to the phenomenon of socially organized denial, by which information about climate science is known in the abstract but disconnected from political, social, and private life, and sees this as emblematic of how citizens of industrialized countries are responding to global warming. Norgaard finds that for the highly educated and politically savvy residents of Bygdaby, global warming was both common knowledge and unimaginable. Norgaard traces this denial through multiple levels, from emotions to cultural norms to political economy. Her report from Bygdaby, supplemented by comparisons throughout the book to the United States, tells a larger story behind our paralysis in the face of today's alarming predictions from climate scientists.

An astute diagnosis of one of the biggest problems in business Denial is the unconscious determination that a certain reality is too terrible to contemplate, so therefore it cannot be true. We see it everywhere, from the alcoholic who swears he's just a social drinker to the president who declares "mission accomplished" when it isn't. In the business world, countless companies get stuck in denial while their challenges escalate into crises. Harvard Business School professor Richard S. Tedlow tackles two essential questions: Why do sane, smart leaders often refuse to accept the facts that threaten their companies and careers? And how do we find the courage to resist denial when facing new trends, changing markets, and tough new competitors? Tedlow looks at numerous examples of organiza­tions crippled by denial, including Ford in the era of the Model T and Coca-Cola with its abortive attempt to change its formula. He also explores other companies, such as Intel, Johnson & Johnson, and DuPont, that avoided catastrophe by dealing with harsh realities head-on. Tedlow identifies the leadership skills that are essential to spotting the early signs of denial and taking the actions required to overcome it.

Environmental Health I Health Care Policy I History Of Medicine --

Blocking out, turning a blind eye, shutting off, not wanting to know, wearing blinkers, seeing what we want to see ... these are all expressions of 'denial'. Alcoholics who refuse to recognize their condition, people who brush aside suspicions of their partner's infidelity, the wife who doesn't notice that her husband is abusing their daughter - are supposedly 'in denial'. Governments deny their responsibility for atrocities, and plan them to achieve 'maximum deniability'. Truth Commissions try to overcome the suppression and denial of past horrors. Bystander nations deny their responsibility to intervene. Do these phenomena have anything in common? When we deny, are we aware of what we are doing or is this an unconscious defence mechanism to protect us from unwelcome truths? Can there be cultures of denial? How do organizations like Amnesty and Oxfam try to overcome the public's apparent indifference to distant suffering and cruelty? Is denial always so bad - or do we need positive illusions to retain our sanity? States of Denial is the first comprehensive study of both the personal and political ways in which uncomfortable realities are avoided and evaded. It ranges from clinical studies of depression, to media images of suffering, to explanations of the 'passive bystander' and 'compassion fatigue'. The book shows how organized atrocities - the Holocaust and other genocides, torture, and political massacres - are denied by perpetrators and by bystanders, those who stand by and do nothing.

Deep disorder pervades medical practice. Disguised in euphemisms like "clinical judgment" and "evidence-based medicine," disorder exists because medical practice lacks a true system of care. The missing system has two core elements: standards of care for managing clinical information, and electronic information tools designed to implement those standards. Electronic information tools are now widely discussed, but the necessary standards of care are still widely ignored. Because these two elements are external to the physician's mind, they address a root cause of disorder: dependence on the internal capacities of autonomous physicians-their personal knowledge, intellect, habits and judgment. In this dependence on the limited, idiosyncratic capacities of individuals, medical practice lags centuries behind the domains of science and commerce. Breaking that dependence is the subject of this book.Going back 400 years to the philosophy of Francis Bacon, and examining parallel ideas from 20th Century thinkers, this book illuminates the origin of medicine's disorder. The analysis is more than theoretical. It grew out of decades of development and clinical experience in finding a new approach to medical practice. Designed to create order and transparency, this new approach involves not only standards and tools but also institutional changes essential to building a true system of care. In the current non-system, physicians bear impossible burdens of performance, other practitioners are barred from sharing those burdens, patients do not participate effectively in their own care, the U.S. spends $2.5 trillion annually without clinical accounting standards, third parties manipulate the situation for their own advantage, and none of the stakeholders are accountable for their own behaviors.This book offers a clear blueprint for building a better system of care, a system that patients, practitioners and third parties could trust. A better system could make health care a source of hope for our economic future, rather than its greatest threat.

Warning - this book contains some swearing and has a cliffhanger ending! Blood doesn't just make her who she is...it also makes her what she is. Like being a sixteen-year-old vampire isn't hard enough, Tessa's throwback human genes make her an outcast among her relatives. But try as she might, she can't get a handle on the vampire lifestyle and all the...blood. Turning her back on the vamp world, she embraces the human teenage lifestyle--high school, peer pressure and finding a boyfriend. Jared manages to stir something in her blood. He's smart and fun and oh, so cute. But Tessa's dream of having the perfect boyfriend turns into a nightmare when vampires attack the movie theatre and kidnap her date. Once again, Tessa finds herself torn between the human world and the vampire one. Will blood own out? Can she make peace with who she is as well as what?

In the 1990s, interventionist policies challenged the rights of individual states to self-governance. Today, non-Western states are more likely to be feted by international institutions offering programs of poverty-reduction, democratization and good governance. States without the right to self-government will always lack legitimate authority. The international policy agenda focuses on bureaucratic mechanisms, which can only institutionalize divisions between the West and the non-West and are unable to overcome the social and political divisions of post-conflict states. Highlighting the dangers of current policy—including the redefinition of sovereignty, and the subsequent erosion of ties linking power and accountability—David Chandler offers a critical look at state-building that will be of interest to all students of international affairs.