George Marshall talk Sept 22nd

Please join CRED for a special event featuring:

 George Marshall

For a talk marking the release of his book

Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains

Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

 Monday September 22^nd

3:15-4:30 PM

Columbia University, Uris Hall 333

Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis

About Don’t Even Think About It

Most of us recognize that climate change is real, and yet we do nothing to stop it. What is this 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 the activists of the Texas Tea Party; the world’s leading climate scientists and the people who denounce them; liberal environmentalists and conservative evangelicals. What he discovered 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 and drive us apart, but rather in what we all share: how our human brains are wired-our evolutionary origins, our perceptions of threats, our cognitive blindspots, 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 and reimagine climate change, for it is not an impossible problem. Rather, it is one we can halt if we can make it our common purpose and common ground. Silence and inaction are the most persuasive of narratives, so we need to change the story.

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 grow as we deal with the greatest challenge we have ever faced.

See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/dont-even-think-about-it-9781620401330/ – sthash.M9kYZGxh.dpuf

George Marshall

George Marshall co-founded the UK’s Climate Outreach Information Network in 2004 with Richard Sexton, and he is currently Director of Projects. George has 25 years experience working across the environmental spectrum – from community level protest groups to senior positions in Greenpeace and the Rainforest Foundation to consultancy work for governments and businesses. He is an expert advisor to the Welsh Government on public communications. George writes widely on climate change issues including articles for The New Statesman, The Guardian, New Scientist and The Ecologist and is the creator of the blogsite  www.climatedenial.org which examines our psychological responses to climate change. He is also the author of Carbon Detox (www.carbondetox.org) a popular book offering “fresh ways to think about personal action to climate change” and rebuilt his own home in Oxford to reduce energy and water consumption by two thirds (www.theyellowhouse.org.uk). He also randomly presents a stand-up routine that he describes as “reasonably entertaining for a two hour climate change powerpoint presentation”.