The study highlights a shift from outright denial to "soft denial" tactics that obscure accountability for climate-damaging actions.
False sense of progress
The authors demonstrate that compartmentalization - presented in a form of strategies of separating sustainable and unsustainable practices into distinct narratives-creates a false sense of progress while enabling harmful activities to continue. This tactic is evident across industries, from fossil fuels to tobacco, and often exploits Global North-South dynamics, as seen in the case of Norwegian companies operating in Brazil. The study also distinguishes compartmentalization from greenwashing, describing it as "an institutionalized, embedded practice of making sense of the world by splitting benefits and costs into separate accounts, while greenwashing involves deliberate subterfuge."Critical framework
The research offers a typology of compartmentalization strategies, including, inter alia, selective risk analysis and moral accounting, and urges policymakers to comprehensively integrate environmental impacts across sectors. This study provides a critical framework for dismantling the structural enablers of climate denial and fostering coordinated ecological action.Yogi Hale Hendlin, Assistant Professor in Environmental Philosophy, to speak at the ’Ecosemiotics is Community’ roundtable, hosted by AMOR MUNDI.
As of 1 January, 2021 Yogi Hendlin has been appointed as Editor-in-Chief of the journal of Biosemiotics: a top journal in the philosophy of biology.
