The march of climate change is stunning and vicious, but its effects on our brains constitute a public-health crisis that has gone largely unreported. Based on seven years of research, this book by journalist and neuroscientist Clayton Page Aldern synthesizes the emerging neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics of global warming and brain health.
Regardless of whether you live in a wildfire zone or a hurricane alley, or swim in warm ponds, his central insights hold, and deserve emphasis. Aldern is the rare writer who dares to ask how climate change has already changed us.
Parts of the discussion are self-evident ... Aldern doesn’t fully address human hardiness or specific measures to mitigate damage to brain health by violent weather and battered environments, but he does satisfactorily convey the significance of neurological and psychological problems associated with climate change.
This is a unique—and uniquely disturbing—addition to the literature. A lyrical and scientifically rigorous account of the emotional and physical toll climate change is taking on the human brain.
