Ebook Don't Even Think About It Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change George Marshall 9781632861023 Books

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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.

Ebook Don't Even Think About It Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change George Marshall 9781632861023 Books

"Even better than Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything), and, in a way, even more important. While Klein's book is still a must read for a complete and accurate understanding of the history of climate change and the movement to stop it (including its inevitable corruption), Marshall addresses more directly the critical failures of the movement to reach beyond its natural base of tree huggers to the broader coalition of stakeholders who will need to be engaged if indeed we are to avoid catastrophe. He demonstrates his own prescription by using humor thought the book to lighten the tone and keep the reader interested, despite the dread topic. He tells very entertaining stories throughout the book, demonstrating by example the importance of storytelling in human communication. The book is never dull, and while covering a lot of ground, manages to maintain a narrative arc across disparate stories that all come together in the end with a coherent set of suggestions for climate change communicators to be more effective at our craft. Anyone who has taken on the task of trying to spur others to action on climate change (or anything else, really), absolutely must read this book. Failing to read this book is like trying to be a vacuum salesman without reading the sales manual for vacuum salesmen! And we cannot afford further communications failure. We have to reach a broader audience, and this book is the most coherent I've read on how to do so. Read this book and then go forth and communicate! Nothing else can be more important. We need you!"

Product details Paperback 272 pages Publisher Bloomsbury USA (August 18, 2015) Language English ISBN-10 9781632861023 ISBN-13 978-1632861023 ASIN 163286102X

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Don't Even Think About It Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change George Marshall 9781632861023 Books Reviews :

Don't Even Think About It Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change George Marshall 9781632861023 Books Reviews

• Even better than Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything), and, in a way, even more important. While Klein's book is still a must read for a complete and accurate understanding of the history of climate change and the movement to stop it (including its inevitable corruption), Marshall addresses more directly the critical failures of the movement to reach beyond its natural base of tree huggers to the broader coalition of stakeholders who will need to be engaged if indeed we are to avoid catastrophe. He demonstrates his own prescription by using humor thought the book to lighten the tone and keep the reader interested, despite the dread topic. He tells very entertaining stories throughout the book, demonstrating by example the importance of storytelling in human communication. The book is never dull, and while covering a lot of ground, manages to maintain a narrative arc across disparate stories that all come together in the end with a coherent set of suggestions for climate change communicators to be more effective at our craft. Anyone who has taken on the task of trying to spur others to action on climate change (or anything else, really), absolutely must read this book. Failing to read this book is like trying to be a vacuum salesman without reading the sales manual for vacuum salesmen! And we cannot afford further communications failure. We have to reach a broader audience, and this book is the most coherent I've read on how to do so. Read this book and then go forth and communicate! Nothing else can be more important. We need you!
• While climate change is the headliner, the book actually just uses that current important phenomenon to demonstrate why our brains are wired to often and compulsively ignore any particular true information we don't want to hear. So this is not really a book about climate change but rather facets of our fundamental human psychology.
• This is an important book. Its central theme is the disconnect between conceptual knowledge, in this case of climate change, and people's willingness to act, which must be mediated by emotional patterns, "frames", values, and conviction.
  
  The scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change on a very large and destructive scale is overwhelming. It is happening now, and looming dramatically larger in the coming decades. There is yet no consensus to act, much less how to act. The dominant response is to ignore the elephant in the room and hope it will not disturb us further.
  
  Debating the evidence and arguing about what may happen is remarkably unproductive in terms of building consensus for action and changing cultural and economic patterns.
  
  Climate change is global, complex, somewhat abstract most of the time, and occurs in a time frame of decades, all of which make it difficult for humans to respond appropriately. Costs are short term, for benefits which are longer term and not perceived as certain, though in fact they will be massively greater than the costs of action now.
  
  This scenario does not readily yield tangible, emotionally salient images. Climate change is a "wicked" problem, subject to conflicting representations and lacking a clean solution.
  
  Marshall is a communications specialist, knowledgeable about the science, and a good communicator. At present there is no systematic way to analyze the cultural and emotional obstructions to clear understanding, so he takes an episodic approach, presenting data, conversations, and ideas from many sources, building a kind of mosaic as he goes.
  
  The facts are sobering. By mid-century disruptions from global warming - economic instability, food and water scarcity, perhaps military conflict, as well as extreme weather - will be widely visible and disruptive, and costly and difficult to contain. This will affect most people now under fifty years old.
  
  Within the lifetime of people now being born the future survival and viability of human civilization will be determined. This is not far in the future.
  
  Humans have never faced a transition on this scale within a short time frame of a lifetime. The poignancy is that the choice is obvious give up carbon based fuels, and consume less altogether. Or face chaos and massive human die offs. Which sounds better?
  
  There is not really a simple culprit for our current situation. Massive numbers of people have bought into the high consumption society as a model.
  
  The fossil fuel industries are the core sector of modern economies. They have generated immense fortunes for their owners and their allies in government and the media, who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting confusion and delay in responding to climate change.
  
  After 200 years of industrial society and two or three generations of a consumer orgy, many people are shocked that it has come to an end in basically a single generation. Consuming less "stuff" is not in itself the end of the world. It is compatible with a rich and elegant lifestyle based on "consuming" culture and community instead.
  
  The model of "stages of death" applies here. We are experiencing widespread denial and anger, to be followed by bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Culturally there is a loss, to be sure, but cultural change is not fatal - unless we fail to adapt to the realities. Then we are addicts who deny the cliff's existence as we sail right over it.
  
  For a clear statement of what lies beyond the current cultural confusion, try Not-Two Is Peace, Expanded 3rd Edition. It cuts to the core of this discussion.
• I am amazed by peoples lack of attention and response to what is at best a significant challenge to future generations and the diversity of species on Earth and at worst a crisis that threatens our very survival. Even so, I opened this book with rather low expectations, but
  I had heard a talk by George Marshall and it was interesting enough to give the book a try.
  As it turned out, I was greatly impressed by the descriptions of social conditioning, evolutionary adaptive behavior, and the particular multivalent nature of climate change as valid explanations as to why the response to climate change has been so tepid.
  Marshall is not optimistic about a change in the public's consciousness regarding climate change, but his book should be required reading for any who wish to be more effective in reaching out to others in the perhaps futile effort to move the country from apathy to action.