How does a changing climate affect our minds, brains and bodies?Clayton Page Aldern is an award winning neuroscientist turned environmental journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Economist, and Grist, where he is a senior data reporter. A Rhodes Scholar, 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. He is the author of The Weight of Nature, How a Changing Climate Changes Our Minds, Brains, and Bodies, which explores the neurobiological impacts of rapid environmental change.
CLAYTON PAGE ALDERN
This is a book about the ways in which the natural world tugs and prods at the decisions you make; how it twists and folds your memories and mental states; how this nebulous everywhere we call the environment tips your interior scales.
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I want to be wowed by the world. I want to gaze at it in awe and wonder. And I think when we take a step back and begin to appreciate the complexity of the interactions around us. We're taking note of a very porous between the self and the rest of the world. We are literally observing our enmeshment in our environment. We are self-conscious selves who are coming to understand the fact that we are not somehow walled off from the rest of the world. And so if we can begin to reframe some of these frightening relationships as profoundly intimate relationships that certainly require addressing. And it's that kind of a reference frameshift that I think is going to help us move out of some of the darkness.
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Our brain is the organ from which our rich experience of the world arises. Brains are responsible for love, for sadness, and these profound experiences are those in which I sought to investigate.
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Solutions for Urban Planning and Climate Adaptation
So many cities can be enhanced through careful planning decisions. We need tree-lined streets and walkable cities. All of all of the vectors by which we can engage with nature and confer neurocognitive benefit. It's all the manners in which our planning decisions around density and green space and traffic and noise pollution ultimately bear on our health.
The Future of Journalism in the age of AI
So, I am a data reporter at Grist. And what does that mean? I'm building statistical models of phenomena. I'm writing web scrapers and building data visualizations, right? I have quite a technical job in terms of my relationship with the field of journalism. I just don't think that those tools ought to be put on some kind of pedestal and framed as the be-all end all of the possibility of the field, right? I think that data science, artificial intelligence, and the advent of these new LLMs they're useful tools to add to the journalistic toolkit. We don't know what the ultimate effect of AI is going to be on journalism, but I think journalism is maybe going to look a little bit different in 20 years.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
I wonder about what you were like as a young person. What gave you this curiosity and sense of mission and purpose?
ALDERN
My mother is an artist, and I think growing up surrounded by her practice exposed me to the creative process and is probably that which afforded me a certain sympathy for those tools and those modes of exploring the world later in life. When I write about the climate crises in the book, I don't profess any kind of moral clarity. We are in uncharted territory and I think it's our curiosity that's going to get us out of it.
