The Weight of Nature

How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains

By: Clayton Page Aldern

Narrated by: Clayton Page Aldern

A New York Times Editors' Choice

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

A Behavioral Scientist’s Summer Book List Pick

A Financial Times Best Summer Book

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.

©2024 Clayton Page Aldern (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Clayton Page Aldern’s writing is so engaging, his research so novel, and his inquiry into our brains and bodies so timely and revealing that this is a rare climate change book you’ll actually savor."—Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us and Countdown

"It's hard, at this late date, to write something profound and new about the overarching crisis of our times. But Clayton Aldern has succeeded—this book is a triumph, rigorous in its reporting but also in its thinking and feeling. I learned an awful lot."—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

“This important watershed book has powerful immediacy as it explains in a clear, warm voice precisely how climate change is making tiny incremental changes in our brains and bodies. Many believe that human brains and bodies can resist or adapt to a warming world. But we learn here that there are limits. Penetrating, intensely personal, and impossible to put down, this is a book you need to read.”—Annie Proulx, author of Fen, Bog and Swamp

Uniquely deep story and theme.

I listen to the prologue of The Weight of Nature and immediately downloaded the audiobook. I was intrigued by the juxtaposition of nature and brain changing. In retrospect it's obvious. This short book touches on a selection of categories that could be included in this broad raging topic of brains and nature. The reader, voices, subtle and thoughtful. It's a tour through places most people have not considered I think. Good job.

Very interesting book with a new perspective

I've read quite a few books and articles about climate change and its impacts, but this book was a really fresh and different approach I had not seen anywhere else. The author is very creative in how he presents the ideas and his style is entertaining and draws you in, which is not easy with a topic like this. His narration is also easy to listen to, and i will likely listen to it again some time soon since there is quite a bit to absorb in here.

Adverse Outcomes of Climate Effects on Brain/Mind

This book presents an exceptionally imaginative and creative synthesis of ideas about how climate change and environmental alterations can affect our brains and minds. The author has interwoven concepts from fields as diverse as neuroscience, psychology, toxicology, environmental epidemiology, linguistic anthropology and geology to project possible outcomes of global warming, environmental pollution and other environmental changes on how well mankind perceives, thinks, feels, and communicates. If the current rate of climate change proceeds unabated, the next generation may see magnitudes of global changes in a lifetime that typically might otherwise occur over thousands of years.

Topics presented include effects of warming on cognition and scholastic performance, increases in CO2 and water temperature increasing algal blooms and neurotoxin production and frequency of amoebic menginoencephalitis. Continued increases in global temperature are expanding habitat for mosquitoes and ticks that can transmit encephalitic diseases and malaria. Dramatic environmental alterations associated with hurricanes, drought, increased forest fires, and loss of flora and fauna can contribute to PTSD, depression and other neuropsychiatric disorders. Dramatic changes in the environment such as loss of long, snowy winters can alter perception of the world and the corresponding subtle and regional language used to communicate with others about their environment and lives.

The author suggests methods to ameliorate and counter these potential adverse effects of global change on the brains and minds of humanity.