num_pages: 272
description: 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?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 Marshalls search for the answers brings him face to face with Nobel Prizewinning psychologists and Texas Tea Party activists; the worlds 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 wiredour 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 Dont 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.
language: None
title: Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change
publisher: Bloomsbury USA