Don't Even Think About It Quotes

“The bottom line is that we do not accept climate change because we wish to avoid the anxiety it generates and the deep changes it requires. In this regard, it is not unlike any other major threat. However, because it carries none of the clear markers that would normally lead our brains to overrule our short-term interests, we actively conspire with each other, and mobilize our own biases to keep it perpetually in the background.”
― George Marshall, Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

“Ironically, one of the best proofs that information does not change people’s attitudes is that science communicators continue to ignore the extensive research evidence that shows that information does not change people’s attitudes.”
― George Marshall, Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

“This is why I have become convinced that the real battle for mass action will not be won through enemy narratives and that we need to find narratives based on cooperation, mutual interests, and our common humanity.”
― George Marshall, Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

“But once things are accepted into our status quo and assumed to be part of normal life, it requires a far higher level of threat to have them removed. People might very well mobilize against a new energy technology that causes climate change, but not against the cars, planes, and power plants that are already woven into the fabric of their lives.”
― George Marshall, DonT Even Think About It

“If our founding narratives are based around enemies, there is no reason to suppose that, as climate impacts build in intensity, new and far more vicious enemy narratives will not readily replace them, drawing on religious, generational, political, class and nationalistic divides -- especially in the Middle East, where water scarcity could catalyze bitter conflict along religious lines. History has shown us too many times that enemy narratives soften us up for the violence, scapegoating or genocide that follows.”
― George Marshall, DonT Even Think About It

“The answer to the partisan deadlock and public disinterest starts, I am convinced, with finding new messengers rather than finding new messages, and then creating the means for them to be heard.”
― George Marshall, Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

“As the Reverend Sally Bingham, an Episcopalian preacher and renewables advocate, put it to me: “We believe that Mary was a virgin, that Jesus rose from the dead, that we might go to heaven. So why is it that two thousand years later, we still believe this story? And how can we believe that and not believe what the world’s most famous climate scientists tell us?”
― George Marshall, Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

“As he says, “Climate change isn’t the elephant in the room; it’s the elephant we’re all inside of.”
― George Marshall, Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

“Acceptance of climate change is assumed to be transferred, as though through osmosis, by reading a book or watching a documentary. When it is acquired, it is assumed, like the data that it is based on, to be solid and unshakeable. Because there is no recognition of climate change conviction, there is no language of climate change doubt, no one is offering to give us encouragement or to help us to “walk though that together.” There is no defense against backsliding and denial, and there is no mechanism for coping with grief.”
― George Marshall, Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

“It should already be clear that social norms might be powerful, but that people are correspondingly extremely alert to the cultural codes that they carry. This is why drawing too much attention to an undesirable norm can seriously backfire. When park rangers erected a sign in Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park that read, “Your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time,” the rate of theft significantly increased. Although the sign attempted to communicate the undesirability of theft, what it actually communicated far more powerfully was that stealing a small amount of wood was a perfectly normal activity.”
― George Marshall, Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

“One way of ensuring against such a challenge is to surround yourself with people who agree with you. In our dispersed and media-driven society, people are able to immerse themselves in a self-constructed social network where the norm is entirely consistent with their own views. They restrict their information sources to carefully selected news media, websites, blogs, and publications—the so-called echo chamber—that reinforce their views. Tea Party members and environmental activists alike share a distrust of the mainstream media and depend on information sources that speak specifically to their interests and values.”
― George Marshall, Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

“2006 Beisner and twenty-two evangelical leaders launched “An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming,” arguing that it is a natural cycle. One of the most active promoters of the declaration, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, argues that we have a God-given right, indeed requirement, to burn fossil fuels because “the parable of the talents tells us that the wicked and lazy steward was the one who buried his talent in the ground and did not do anything to multiply it.”
― George Marshall, Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

“The Future of Humanity Institute conducted a poll of academic experts on global risks. They gave an estimate of 19 percent probability that the human species will go extinct before the end of this century. The Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change factored a 9.5 percent risk of extinction within the next century into its calculations.”
― George Marshall, Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

“Things came to a head around unfounded allegations in late 2009 that climate scientists had been distorting data. Glenn Beck on Fox TV called on scientists to commit suicide; the late Andrew Breitbart, a right-wing provocateur, tweeted, “Capital punishment for Dr. James Hansen”; and the blogger Marc Morano called for climate scientists to be publically flogged.”
― George Marshall, Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

“climate change contains none of the clear signals that we require to mobilize our inbuilt sense of threat and that it is remarkably and dangerously open to misinterpretation.”
― George Marshall, Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change