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Informationen zum Autor Clayton Page Aldern Klappentext "... 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 and solve problems. It influences serotonin release, which in turn increases the chance of impulsive violence. Air pollution from wildfires and smokestacks affects everything from sleeplessness to baseball umpires' error rates. Immigration judges are more likely to reject asylum applications on hotter days. And these kinds of effects are not easily medicated, since certain drugs we might look to just aren't as effective at higher temperatures. Heatwaves and hurricanes can wear on memory, language, and pain systems. Wildfires seed PTSD. And 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 Joaquin Valley and public schools across the US to communities in Norway's arctic, Micronesian islands, and the French Alps, this is a disturbing, unprecedented portrait of a global crisis we thought we understood"-- Leseprobe 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 nat...
