The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains - Hardcover

Aldern, Clayton Page

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593472748 ISBN 13: 9780593472743

Verlag: Dutton, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

A New York Times Editors' Choice

A Rachel Carson Environment Book Award Finalist

A Next Big Idea Club and Sierra Magazine Must-Read Book

A Behavioral Scientist’s Notable Book of 2024

A Financial Times Best Summer Book

A Bookshop Most Notable Science Book of 2024

A deeply reported, eye-opening book about climate change, our brains, and the weight of nature on us all.

The march of climate change is stunning and vicious, with rising seas, extreme weather, and oppressive heat blanketing the globe. But its effects on our very brains constitute a public-health crisis that has gone largely unreported. Based on seven years of research, this book by the award-winning journalist and trained neuroscientist Clayton Page Aldern, synthesizes the emerging neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics of global warming and brain health. A masterpiece of literary journalism, this book shows readers how a changing environment is changing us today, from the inside out.

Aldern calls it the weight of nature.

Hotter temperatures make it harder to think clearly and problem-solve. They increase the chance of impulsive violence. Immigration judges are more likely to reject asylum applications on hotter days. Umpires, to miss calls. Air pollution, heatwaves, and hurricanes can warp and wear on memory, language, and sensory systems; wildfires seed PTSD. And climate-fueled ecosystem changes extend the reach of brain-disease carriers like mosquitos, brain-eating amoebas, and the bats that brought us the mental fog of long COVID.

How we feel about climate change matters deeply; but this is a book about much more than climate anxiety. As Aldern richly details, it is about the profound, direct action of global warming on our brains and behavior—and the most startling portrait yet of unforeseen environmental influences on our minds. From farms in the San Joaquin Valley and public schools across the United States to communities in Norway’s Arctic, the Micronesian islands, and the French Alps, this book is an unprecedented portrait of a global crisis we thought we understood.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Clayton Aldern is a neuroscientist turned environmental journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New Republic, Mother Jones, Vox, Newsweek, The Economist, Scientific American, and Grist, where he is a senior data reporter. His climate change data visualizations have appeared in a variety of forums, including on the US Senate floor in a speech by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse.

A Rhodes Scholar and a Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow, he holds a master’s in neuroscience and a master’s in public policy from the University of Oxford. He is also a research affiliate at the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington, a grantee of the Pulitzer Center, and has contributed to reporting teams that have won a national Edward R. Murrow Award, multiple Online Journalism Awards, and the Breaking Barriers Award from the Institute for Nonprofit News. See claytonaldern.com or follow him on Twitter @compatibilism.

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This book is about the neuroscience and psychology of how a changing world changes us from the inside out. It is not a book about climate anxiety—about worrying about climate change—though
we’ll touch briefly on the seriousness of the subject later on. It is also not a book about climate communications or climate politics and the manners in which the psychological dimensions of the climate problem lend themselves to complicating those arenas. That’s important stuff; you can read about it elsewhere. I also won’t wade too deeply into the trenches of consciousness, though a useful reminder- mantra might be: The mind is grounded in the brain and the body. Mental energy is physical energy. There; that’s about all you’re going to hear from me on neurophilosophy. In this book, instead, you’ll only find evidence of direct interventions of environmental change on the brain and mind. That is the scope of this thing. 

Here is who I am and why I care about any of this mess. These days, I often introduce myself as a recovering neuroscientist. Back in 2015, when I first conceived this project, I had just finished a short graduate program in neuroscience at the University of Oxford, and I was spending much of my time fiddling with a programming language called MATLAB, trying to replicate in a computer the results of an experiment someone had conducted on zebra-finch brains. I was known as a laboratory technician. I worked in a place called the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour. I’d thought I’d landed my dream job. I was concurrently enrolled in a graduate degree in public
policy. I drank cask-temperature ale and cold Pimm’s cups and played rugby and puttered around in boats called punts and occasionally wore a formal cape. Charmed life. I’m still grateful today.


To be blunt, though, it all felt a little disconnected from the world that existed outside the Centre.

And then a friend showed me a report from the Pentagon. Earlier that year, the Department of Defense had quietly submitted a slim report to Congress on the national security implications of a changing climate. The fourteen-page document, written in the well-oiled, acronym-heavy prose of the military apparatus, was remarkable in what it laid bare. Not only did Defense—not exactly Greenpeace—see climate change as a serious threat to national security; it noted
that these effects were already occurring. The mid-2000s Syrian drought, in its choking of agriculture and flame-fanning of mass displacement, had helped spark the Syrian civil war. In 2012, on home turf, when Sandy crashed those torrents of stormwater through the
hallways of New York City, the Defense Department was forced to mobilize twenty-four thousand personnel. To the military and intelligence brass, climate change wasn’t hypothetical. We were already fighting it.


Most astounding in the July 2015 report, though, was a framing of how a changing climate acted on our security. For the Department of Defense, climate change wasn’t about rising temperatures and sea-level rise. Those concerns were secondary to something more human: the global climate’s ability to “aggravate existing problems” like poverty, social tensions, ineffective leadership, and weak political institutions. It wasn’t just that a warmer world would hurt us outright; it was that a warmer world would make us hurt one another. I remember a jigsaw piece snapping into place in my head.


A few months before the submission of the Pentagon report, a Stanford economist named Marshall Burke and two of his colleagues had published an article in the Annual Review of Economics about the relationships between climate and conflict. Surveying dozens of independent studies, the team illustrated how deflections in temperature or rainfall patterns were associated with increases in both large-scale conflicts and individual violent crimes. The extraordinary finding here, surfacing again and again in the studies Burke’s team reviewed, was that these crime spikes couldn’t be pinned to things like income or food insecurity. The statisticians could correct for all those effects. There was something else going on.


It’s the kind of finding that sets off alarm bells in the ears of neuroscientists. With a Stanford professor and now the Department of Defense claiming temperature changes were somehow intimately related to violence, I began to wonder which tangle of neurological pathways might be at work—which strands, if any, could be separated from the geopolitics and the sociology and the anthropology—and what this rat’s nest might mean for a warming world. Climate change was always out there, in that other place and future time. If droughts and rising temperatures were doing something to people now, in here, that most personal of spaces, it seemed worth asking how and why. I channeled my policy degree into climate policy; I left the lab for environmental
journalism. This book is the product of the seven years of research that followed.


As suggested earlier, the link between temperature and aggression is the tip of a melting iceberg. As I dug into the neuroscience of environmental change, evidence of invisible forces emerged by the truckload. A changing Earth was infiltrating our internal worlds, guiding our hands, and putting words in our mouths. The environment was everywhere. And of course it was. I was a fish coming to understand water for the first time.


Together, the chapters presented here represent a fundamental piece to the environmental puzzle that in our climate modeling, policymaking, and personal lives we are broadly ignoring—to our own detriment. The effects of climate change on our brains constitute a public health crisis that has gone largely unreported. And it is past time to act. Immigration judges are more likely to reject asylum applications on hotter days. Some drugs that act on the brain aren’t as effective at higher temperatures. Wildfires evict us; chronic stress becomes clinical. In the world of disease vectors, climate-fueled ecosystem changes are expanding the reach of everything from the mosquitoes of cerebral malaria fame to brain-eating amoebae most of us have no reason to have ever even heard of. Major depression symptomatology skyrockets with landscape loss. Your high schooler is going to lose a couple of points on the SAT if they take it on a particularly hot day. We are already victims of the climate crisis, whether we know it or not.


Which is frightening. It should be, anyway. It frightened me when I began to understand it, and it frightens me now.


I don’t seek to leave you in the fetal position, though. And I don’t think that needs to be our response. I feel this way for a couple of reasons. The first is that some of our impending public health nightmare is not without solutions. Some are technical in nature: infectious disease protocols, pharmacological fixes, stopgaps like air-conditioning and air-filtration systems. But much of the psychological, mental, and emotional resilience here will be rooted in techniques adapted from psychotherapy and the behavioral sciences—adaptation responses we can all apply to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Dutton
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593472748
• ISBN 13: 9780593472743
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Dutton; https://www.penguin.com/dutton-childrens-overview/; ; Im Mittelfeld 25; K?ln; Deutschland; 51105; Deutschland