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.
