Clayton Page Aldern presents 'The Weight of Nature'

Third Place Books is pleased to welcome Clayton Page Aldern to our Ravenna store! Aldern will be discussing his new book synthesizing the emerging neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics of climate change and brain health, . This event is free and open to the public.

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This event is free to attend. Registration is required in advance.

For readers of Kolbert's Under a White Sky and Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, to all those who love science books about the brain
The effects of climate change on our brains are a public health crisis that has gone largely unreported. Based on six years of research, award-winning journalist and trained neuroscientist Clayton Aldern synthesizes the emerging neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics of climate change and brain health. A masterpiece of deeply reported, superb 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.
Newly named mental conditions include: climate grief, ecoanxiety, environmental melancholia, pre-traumatic stress disorder. High-schoolers are preparing for a chaotic climate with the same combination of urgency, fear, and resignation they reserve for active-shooter drills. But mostly, as Aldern richly details, we don’t realize what global warming is doing to our brains.
More heat means it is harder to think straight. Even at a mere 92 degrees, data shows that IQ measurably decreases. We now know that solar radiation influences serotonin release, which in turn increases the chance of impulsive violence. Air pollution from wildfires affects everything from sleeplessness to baseball umpires’ error rates. Heat makes us less forgiving. Immigration judges are more likely to reject asylum applications on hotter days. And these kinds of mental health problems are not easily medicated. Certain drugs we might look to just aren’t as effective at higher temperatures. And, ugh, climate-fueled ecosystem changes extend the reach of brain disease carriers like the mosquitos of cerebral-malaria fame, brain-eating amoebae, and the bats that brought us the mental fog of long Covid.
From farms in the San Joaquim Valley and public schools across the US to communities in Norway's arctic, African war zones and Asian deltas this is a disturbing, unprecedented portrait of a global crisis we thought we understood.

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. (Photo credit: Bonnie Cutts)

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.

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