Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change
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Overview
An Esquire Essential Book on Climate Change
From the founder of the Climate Outreach and Information Network, a groundbreaking take on the most urgent question of our time: Why, despite overwhelming scientific evidence, do we still ignore climate change?
“Please read this book, and think about it.” --Bill Nye
Most of us recognize that climate change is real, and yet we do nothing to stop it. What is this psychological mechanism that allows us to know something is true but act as if it is not? George Marshall’s search for the answers brings him face to face with Nobel Prize-winning psychologists and the activists of the Texas Tea Party; the world’s leading climate scientists and the people who denounce them; liberal environmentalists and conservative evangelicals. What he discovered is that our values, assumptions, and prejudices can take on lives of their own, gaining authority as they are shared, dividing people in their wake.
With engaging stories and drawing on years of his own research, Marshall argues that the answers do not lie in the things that make us different and drive us apart, but rather in what we all share: how our human brains are wired-our evolutionary origins, our perceptions of threats, our cognitive blindspots, our love of storytelling, our fear of death, and our deepest instincts to defend our family and tribe. Once we understand what excites, threatens, and motivates us, we can rethink and reimagine climate change, for it is not an impossible problem. Rather, it is one we can halt if we can make it our common purpose and common ground. Silence and inaction are the most persuasive of narratives, so we need to change the story.
In the end, Don’t Even Think About It is both about climate change and about the qualities that make us human and how we can grow as we deal with the greatest challenge we have ever faced.
An Esquire Essential Book on Climate Change
A witty, insightful, and groundbreaking take on one of the most urgent questions of our time: Why, despite overwhelming scientific evidence, do we still ignore climate change?
World-renowned for his work on the psychology of climate change denial: George Marshall’s original approach to the issue focuses not on the science of climate change but rather on our irrational denial of it.
An engaging and entertaining expert: See him speak on the book’s topic at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SqFZgoE_Us
Provides real-world solutions: Marshall shows how we can come together as a society and finally take real steps toward reversing climate change.
Inclusive approach: Marshall seeks answers from corporate lobbyists, psychologists, climate scientists, evangelical preachers, Tea Party activists, politicians, and comic book fans.
[Marshall] offers advice on confronting climate change head on, stepping away from Green Guilt, and putting potentially world-saving policies into action.
Intelligent and genial . . . In the end, Marshall is neither fatalistic nor idealistic about our chances of survival. Yes, he says, we’re wired to ignore climate change. But we’re also wired to do something about it.
Clearly we’re not responding to the reality of climate change with the speed the crisis requires. This book explains some of the reasons that could be--and how we might work around them in the short time that we have.
The science of climate change is easy: burning fossil fuels creates greenhouse gasses that are warming our world. George Marshall reminds us about the hard part: connecting the wellhead to the tailpipe in people’s minds as soon as possible. Please read this book, and think about it. Let’s get to work.
Illuminating and important--makes clear why we continue down a dangerous path of increasing climate disruption, even when attractive, hospitable, alternative paths are available.
George Marshall is one of the most interesting, challenging and original thinkers on the psychology of our collective climate denial. If his advice were heeded, we might just have the courage to look unblinkingly at this existential crisis, and then to act.
Enlightening.
A real soul searching challenge for us all. Marshall illuminates the path to embarking on a heroic quest for a just and equitable world. A sobering, yet hopeful book.
In 42 engaging, bite-size chapters, Marshall presents the psychological research demonstrating why climate change simply doesn’t feel dangerous enough to justify action and how we can trick our brains into changing our sense of urgency about the problem. His work is a much needed kick in the pants for policymakers, grassroots environmentalists, and the public to induce us to develop effective motivational tools to help us take action to face the reality of climate change before it’s too late.
Fantastic.
Essential reading for everyone interested in communicating the science of climate change and its urgent policy implications.
This is not a book to read and put away-but one that merits returning to and engaging with intellectually. Is there a higher compliment that one can give an author?
Absorbing, all-embracing, immensely readable.
- Title: Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change
- Author: George Marshall
- Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
- Print Publication Date: 2014
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 272
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781620401347, 9781632861023, 163286102X, 1620401347
- Resource ID: LLS:9781620401347
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T15:26:51Z
George Marshall is the founder of the Climate Outreach and Information Network, based in Oxford UK, and over the past 25 years has worked at all levels of theenvironmental movement including senior positions for Greenpeace US and the Rainforest Foundation. He is one of the leading European experts in climate change communications, is a lead advisor to the Welsh Government, and counts major environmental organizations, politicians, faith groups, businesses, and trades unions among his clients. He lives in Wales. His website is http://climatedenial.org/.