Saving Us Quotes

“The bottom line is this. To care about climate change, you only need to be one thing, and that’s a person living on planet Earth who wants a better future. Chances are, you’re already that person—and so is everyone else you know.”
― Katharine Hayhoe, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World

“On climate change and other issues with moral implications, we tend to believe that everyone should care for the same self-evident reasons we do. If they don’t, we all too often assume they lack morals. But most people do have morals and are acting according to them; they’re just different from ours. And if we are aware of these differences, we can speak to them.”
― Katharine Hayhoe, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World

“No matter where we live, the result is the same: as people identify with increasingly narrow tribes, they begin to view those with different views as alien, not worth respecting or even treating as human. The Beyond Conflict Institute’s 2020 report, America’s Divided Mind, didn’t mince any words: “Increasingly, Americans who identify themselves as either Democrats or Republicans view one another less as fellow citizens and more as enemies who represent a profound threat to their identities.”
― Katharine Hayhoe, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World

“We often believe that “if we just tell people the facts, since people are basically rational beings, they’ll all reach the right conclusions,” cognitive linguist George Lakoff explains. But that’s not the way we humans think. Instead, we think in what he calls “frames.” Frames are cognitive structures that determine how we see the world. When we encounter facts that don’t fit our frame, it’s the frame that stays while “the facts are either ignored, dismissed, [or] ridiculed.”
― Katharine Hayhoe, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World

“think of every conversation as being three conversations at once: about facts, feelings, and identity.”
― Katharine Hayhoe, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World

“ironically, the very thing we fear most. Talk about it. Why are people not talking about something that matters to them so much? Even if we agree it’s real and it’s serious, talking about it can be discouraging and depressing. There’s too great a risk the conversation might devolve into a screaming match or end up leaving everyone overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem. We want to talk about it; we just don’t know how.”
― Katharine Hayhoe, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World

“As humans, we are prone to tuning out repeated bad messages if they do not relate directly to our lives, or if we feel like fixing them would be even worse for us than letting them run their course.”
― Katharine Hayhoe, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World

“fear works well when coupled with uncertainty to induce inaction rather than action.”
― Katharine Hayhoe, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World

“as comedian Stephen Colbert tweeted sarcastically in 2014, “Global warming isn’t real because I was cold today. Also great news: World hunger is over because I just ate.”
― Katharine Hayhoe, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World