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 yet we do nothing to
stop it. What is the 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 Texas Tea Party activists; the world's leading climate
scientists and those who denounce them; liberal environmentalists and
conservative evangelicals. What he discovers 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,
but rather in what we share: how our human brains are wired--our
evolutionary origins, our perceptions of threats, our cognitive blind
spots, 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 climate change, for
it is not an impossible problem. Rather, we can halt it if we make it
our common purpose and common ground. 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 deal with the greatest challenge we have ever
faced.
