We are porous creatures. Our bodies are inextricably bound to the environments we move through. But as that environment changes, so too do our bodies.
In this conversation with Grist magazine data journalist, “recovering neuroscientist,” and author Clayton Page Aldern, we explore the myriad ways that a changing environment changes our brains and bodies. From zoonotic disease vectors (diseases that move from animals to humans) and blue-green algae threats, to studies on what heat does to our social interactions and justice systems, Aldern helps us understand that a warming planet isn’t just about “nature out there,” and we don’t just experience climate change in spectacular events like hurricanes. The effects are cumulative, creeping, often invisible, and terrifyingly intimate.
But we don’t just take you to the edge of a scary cliff and leave you there. Aldern offers a lot of suggestions that we all can do, right now, regardless of the current political moment.
Spoiler alert: the answer to living in what Aldern calls a “chronic soup of exposure” is not, as the tech bros would have it, transcending the body’s dependence on nature by moving to Mars or avoiding death.
Don’t miss this conversation with Clayton Page Aldern. He’ll change the way you think about climate change, and your brain, and your body.
Shownotes
- Clayton’s book, The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains
- Clayton’s website and Blue Sky handle @compatibilism.bsky.social
- Great analysis of and direct attribution for Viktor Frankl’s quote about “between stimulus and response…”, here.
- Climate Magic episode with Jyoti Mishra, referenced in this episode
- Grist.org magazine
- Neuroclimate Working Group at Columbia
- The Active Inference Institute
TRANSCRIPT:
ALDERN: Pitchers are more likely to hit batters on hotter days. Immigration judges are more likely to reject asylum applicants on hotter days.
RAY: Welcome to Climate Magic, where we talk about the relationship between climate change and our hearts and minds. I'm Sarah Jaquette Ray, a professor at Cal Poly Humboldt and fellow climate-despairing human.
ALDERN: There are manifold intersections between climate health and neurological health. Why don't we consider braiding them together and think about climatological and neurological health as one?
RAY: Today on the show, I speak with neuroscientist-turned-environmental journalist Clayton Page Aldern about how climate change changes our brains, which actually happens to be the subtitle of his new book, The Weight of Nature. Aldern calls himself a recovering neuroscientist, by which I take it to mean he's really good at brain science, but he's also really interested in how it fits into big philosophical questions of the world, such as what the heck we should do about climate change. He's a research affiliate at the center for Studies and Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington, and his writing appears in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New Republic, Vox, The Economist and Scientific American.
Clayton and I geeked out about the brain. Yes. So you'll definitely learn a lot about prefrontal cortex, brain-eating amoeba, cognitive loads, and how our brains shape our behavior. He describes research happening in phenomena like “shifting baseline syndrome” and “overinterpretation theory,” big words that help us understand how our brains are not equipped to understand or deal with the effects of climate change.
Aldern unpacks how climate change will increasingly have us swimming in what he called a “chronic soup of exposure”-- toxins, disease vectors and heat, for example, which interact synergistically in ways that we're only beginning to understand.
But as he does in his book, I ask him to give us a rope to grab on to, to walk us back from the brink. We explore how we can become solutions all the time. Just as a lot of the effects of climate change won't be big things like hurricanes, but the more slow, cumulative, and often invisible effects that he documents in his book, so too is the work we can do to practice daily self-knowledge in relation to the world.
And it's also a tool to build our resilience for engaging and changing the systems that create these problems in the first place. What it comes down to in this conversation is that we are porous creatures, and the better we interact with the world, the better equipped we will be to adapt to climate change. And maybe even fix it. So are you ready for this conversation about your brain on climate change? Let's dive in.
So Clayton, welcome to the show.
ALDERN: Oh, I'm in it. Thank you so much for having me.
RAY: You call yourself a recovering neuroscientist, and you work for Grist. You do a lot of environmental stuff. You just wrote this beautiful book, The Weight of Nature. What is that about?
ALDERN: Well, I would venture to say it's about the title, but nobody really knows what the title means. But I do think there's a clue there. I'm interested in the relationship between environmental change and internal change, and I, after years of feeling the climate, began to think of it as a kind of way to begin to think of it as this force that we always brought along with us in our internal world, this force that acted on our behavior, our feelings, our spiritual life, whatever it may be. It felt like a weight. Knowledge of the future certainly felt like a weight.
But in thinking a bit more about the mechanics at play, how is it that something like a changing environment could indeed at all bear on our internal environments? In asking those questions and diving into the relevant literature surrounding those questions and, dovetailing and dovetailing and dovetailing out from those questions into the wider worlds of behavioral economics and, various other realms of cognitive sciences, ecological psychology, etc., etc. you arrive at a series of conclusions that basically say: we are subject to the whims of a wild planet. As the environment changes, we should expect to change in kind. And this is a book about those manifold interactions. It's about all the manners in which environmental change bears on brain chemistry, decision making, behavioral health, all the way through to ecological, disease vectors and language.
RAY: It's interesting you should say that, because I remember when Covid happened, I remember my book had just come out on climate anxiety, and I was giving all these virtual talks and, you know, as I was in the book thing when Covid came out. So I was trying to connect Covid to what I was writing about in the book. And I would ask this question to people, how do you personally experience climate change? And nobody would say: this pandemic we're living through right now.
So, yeah, the thing about your book that I love so much, and I really want to dig a little bit deeper into this, is that the main ways that our brains often, or the way media tells us to think about climate change, is through these big spectacular events like hurricanes or extreme weather, scary stuff. Because that's even right now, with the federal government's rejection of climate change, there's still some wiggle room there around “extreme weather events”. Okay, that we will allow, right? We won't go through the other stuff, this thing called climate change. But the whole point of your book is that we should be looking at these more intimate, slower, often invisible ways that climate changes are already changing us. It's not something on the horizon that we can even see coming. Can you give us more examples about that from your research? You just gave us a few. But this is what I really love about your book. It's not about climate change in these big, spectacular ways. It's about all of these kind of intimate, slow, invisible things, that is weighing on us, as you put it.
ALDERN: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to begin, it's worth reminding ourselves, I think, what it is that the brain does at all in the body. And you'll note that I used the word body, which is an important part of the story here. This, indeed, while being a work of, Gosh, I don't know, literary neuroscience or something, is not just about the brain. It is about the fact that the brain only exists within the context of the body, and the body exists only within the context of the environment. And what does that brain do? Well, it models both of those things. It reaches out into the world using the senses, things like eyes and ears and vision and audition, etc., etc. and uses that sensory information to effectively construct a model of what you, as an agent with conscious access to that model, might expect of the world.
And similarly, it builds a model of your body, right? Because your understanding of the world is also predicated on how you feel in it. And that includes things like hunger, by the way, your brain is always working to understand where it is you're at, what it's like out there, how you're feeling about it. And indeed, if you are experiencing what you expect to experience, that's what the brain does at it. It sets up this world model that says, here's how I think the world is going to be. And then when those expectations are violated, you learn something, you change, and in fact, you update your model.
And I begin with what it is the brain does because it's quite relevant to the current climatological context in which the world is changing. Sometimes it's changing very rapidly. Sometimes, as you suggest, these changes are subtle and creeping. But fundamentally, what remains true is that our expectations of what constitutes normal are constantly being violated. And when that happens, our model must update accordingly.
The book begins with a discussion of memory. Because memory is this thing that is supposed to encode the past. It's one of the processes that sets our expectations about the future. So when we think about that world building, that model building activity of the brain memory is very useful because you need to remember what happened in order to navigate the world accordingly. But memory isn't enough, right? You also need a process that competes with memory if you are serious about instantiating a model that reflects the granularity of the world and its dynamism.
And so you need a process which we call forgetting, that allows the brain to effectively update its world model. What that means is, as the world changes in its, you know, raucous climate emergency, inevitably we're effectively going to be inducing amnesia into the system. We're going to be updating our world model to somehow try to capture this high variance, high uncertainty, surprising world in which we have found ourselves. And that means forgetting the normality of the past.
So I think the first point to make is that we have some really insidious, quite intimate stuff going on with respect to climate change and memory. This is a long way of saying everything is relative. Everything is change. You know, the Buddhists were right and given that forgetting this process of active forgetting is a real neurological process in the brain, we need to be paying some serious attention to it as the world changes. Because again, we should expect our brains to change in kind when it comes to the cognitive effects of climate change.
When it comes to what I think we could most readily wrap our heads around, it's stuff like the fact that people are more aggressive on days, right? Yeah. It's also true that living beings appear to be less rational thinkers in the heat that's going to affect things like violence. It's going to affect things like student test scores. Those are the readily interpretable age old relationships that we observe between things like temperature and things like thinking.
RAY: One of your great quotes, you say, “it isn't just that a warmer world would hurt us outright, it's that a warmer world would make us hurt one another.” And the reason why that made me go and get your book, honestly, was because I thought maybe people will pay attention to that. You know, this kind of like the whole risk perception that the earth changing could be hurting us is just too much, you know, like people just check out, you know, but to think we might actually hurt each other and to turn this to more for like, how is it that we're going to function as a society because we will hurt each other more? Yeah. Your chapter on that was very difficult to read. So yeah, thanks for that. That hook for us to get into this.
ALDERN: Yeah. Well, you know, and it's not just about what's happening in the brain. It's the fact that climate change is also expanding the habitable range of brain disease vectors like ticks.
RAY: Can we talk about that? So I got to say that your chapters on zoonoses and brain eating amoeba and rabies and the vampire bats, I mean, that chapter got me to the edge of the cliff. So. Yeah. Let's go there.
ALDERN: Yeah.
RAY: The person that you interviewed who talked about the fear of lack of political will and not being the biggest barrier, because when I think about all these brain eating amoeba and neurotoxins, I really am freaked out. Like, I really have a total climate anxiety paralysis moment. So show us, show us why. You know, for people who have not read your book, why would I get there? But also this kind of other argument you're making in that chapter in those chapters about political will and how we're going to get organized around it.
ALDERN: Yeah. Happy to, you know, these are kind of the nightmare chapters as various interviewers have referred to them. Right. I mean, we've touched on the fact that, of course, we are permeable individuals. We are permeable selves. Again, to, you know, go back to the Buddhists. Right. There's no such thing as the self.
RAY: And not Descartes. We're not in Descartes anymore. Yeah.
ALDERN: So of course these forces and other meteorological forces are acting on other beings, and those beings interact with our porous selves in ways that are less than savory for our neurological health. So, again, we're talking about things like ticks and mosquitoes and vampire bats and, you know, all again, all the, you know, kind of nightmare creatures that are living their own lives doing their own thing, happily engaged in social relationships, in their own communities, foraging the food that they need. And a climatological vector comes into town, something like a change in a rain pattern, something like a shift in a temperature gradient, whatever it may be.
And these beings, vampire bats, which carry rabies, for example, decide that they need to live somewhere else. And so they migrate just, you know, they're climate refugees, just in the manner that we see people changing where they live as a function of climate change. It frequently means that they're cohabitating with us. These are the beings that are carrying the disease vectors that for people cause things like, you know, yellow fever and neuro paralysis and, you know, cerebral malaria and nature is coming to us. The main story is that as the climate changes, the vectors of brain disease wind up in our brains more and more frequently. Even if we don't change our behavior and that's kind of step one in, you know, the nightmare journey. Because after the point of encountering a brain disease factor. Okay, great.
So, let's move on to something like neurotoxins, right? Forget the fact that a mosquito is carrying a virus. Let's just, you know, jump to the notion of kind of pure environmental, brain interaction again, wherein we have something like, I don't know, an extreme storm is loosening something like an endocrine disruptor, right? Some kind of chemical that was, you know, maybe previously sequestered in the Earth.
Now, given the tumult of the environment, it appears in groundwater sources. Again, we've got all kinds of exposures that are manifesting as a function of a changing climate. One that I cover in the book is, with respect to an organism or a series of organisms, a type of bacteria known as cyanobacteria that colloquially we refer to as blue green algae.
Blue green algae. What do they love? They love warm water. Which, you know, the waters are warming, by the way. They love sunlight. Well, the sun isn't really at risk of burning out, so they're down with that. They'd love to be fertilized, right? They love to grow as a function of an appropriate balance between nitrogen and phosphorus. And we have way too much synthetic fertilizer in our agricultural operations. And when extreme weather rolls into town, all of this agricultural runoff ends up in streams and rivers. And lo and behold, it fertilizes everything it touches, including the cyanobacteria. Here you get these enormous blue green algae blooms.
What is it that they're doing? Well, unfortunately, they're releasing a neurotoxin that appears to be one of the most compelling causal explanations for increased rates of things like ALS, right? Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig's disease, ALS. There's no cure for, and we do not know if there is a synergistic relationship between something like BMR. That's the neurotoxin BMR exposure. And I don't know, methylmercury exposure, which, by the way, is also increasing as a function of some of these same environmental factors.
So again, you know, nightmare one is that we're going to be exposed to a lot of stuff that's already happening. It's probably only going to get worse. Nightmare number two is that we don't know how these factors interact with one another. And we won't know we have, you know, some semblance of an understanding as a function of the work that chemical ecologists do. We have some semblance of an understanding as a function of, you know, the epidemiologists who are doing very careful work on here and, out there on these kinds of exposure rates from multiple factors. But ultimately, so many of the diseases that we're talking about, especially things like neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, they tend not to manifest until later in life.
RAY: Yeah. Right.
ALDERN: Right, right. They're very different from something like malaria where you are bit by a mosquito. And then lo and behold, you've got malaria.
RAY: Right.
ALDERN: These are neurodegenerative conditions in which you experience a series of steps that lead you toward the manifestation of the disease. And then, lo and behold, at age 40 or age 60, you see the manifestation thereof. But it's based on a cumulative series of exposures that began, you know, 20 years previously.
RAY: Womb, right?
ALDERN: Or in the womb. Yeah. And so, we don't know what we don't know. And right now, we are living in a chronic soup of exposure. How do we pull back from that edge to get to the second part?
I mean, we kind of already know how to deal with this kind of stuff. It's like, that's literally why the field of public health exists. So it's true that this stuff is going to get worse. And it's true that there's a lot that we don't understand. And also there's a lot that we do understand. Right? And, and when it comes to continuing medical education and when it comes to bolstering health systems, when it comes to bolstering public health surveillance systems, those kinds of practices are, you know, they're not unique to the study of climate change. They're not even particularly expensive when it comes to, you know, something like public expenditures, right? You know, public health, you know, it's often so much cheaper than many other medical interventions.
And so this is to say, there are public health interventions. They're individual behavioral interventions that, you know, one can institute in their own lives to mitigate some of the potential exposures to which we’re subjected. That's not to say that, one can, you know, protect themselves from everything. And it's certainly not to say that nature is bad and we should lock ourselves in our homes, right? But it is to say that, hey, if you're gonna jump in a freshwater lake in the summer, maybe wear a nose plug, because no matter how remote the risk, you probably don't want a brain eating amoeba to end up in your nostrils, because the fatality rate is like 99.7%.
RAY: Yeah. This is what I meant by the kind of slow or invisible or things that don't seem like a bear coming at you down a hill or, you know, the scary stuff that risk perception theory and psychologists will tell you is the reason why climate change is so hard to have people frame as a big enough threat to do anything about, and so I what I love about that example is this kind of okay. Yeah, it's, there's all these things that climate change is doing. We may not have all of the risk perception equipment mechanics, as you call it, in our brains to address.
So I'm sort of curious, you know, public health. What you say there is like, okay, there's behavioral things that we can do to mitigate, but also these systems that are already in place have nothing to do with climate change. What I love about it, too, is it's a call for greater relationships between experts and regulators. And we're in a kind of a moment where that relationship is really shredding. I'm curious, you know, you're sort of saying in this optimistic way, we could be doing this. I would be just fine. Your book obviously came out before 2025. So we're in a new moment politically. So that really does lead us towards having to do more of this individual behavior or modifications. But yeah, just curious if you have some thoughts about that.
ALDERN: Well, I don't want to say that, where we're being thrown to the dogs here. But to a certain extent, I think that you're correct in that the importance of individual behavioral efforts, individual emotional efforts to safeguard ourselves against some of these threats are going to become more and more important.
I think the reason I balk ever so slightly at the notion of what is different about the current political moment is because ultimately, the types of changes we ought to be making in our lives at an individual level in order to shore up something like biological resilience, let's call it– those are probably changes that we ought to be making anyway.
The fact that I can probably do a better job of being aware of my own impulses that may arise as a function of environmental action in environmental interactions, that's true irrespective of who's in the white house. Right?
The fact that something like mindfulness or breathwork or something like, you know, a serious meditation practice is beneficial to neurological health and is neuroprotective, especially with respect to some of the former kind of behavioral aspects that we were discussing. That's a fact of science that has nothing to do with the politics of the moment.
RAY: I really like this because, I don't know if solace is the right word, but I find empowerment or agency despite what's happening. I think about exactly what you just said, that this is work that we're going to have to do anyway, regardless of what's happening. And in some ways, looking to think about what's happening with the weathervane has nothing to do with the weather that we can be creating.
But you actually have a whole section on mindfulness and you just brought it up. I'd love to hear a little bit more about the mechanics of what you mean by that. Tell me how mindfulness is going to help regardless who's in the white house? With some of these behavioral and impulse control things. Exactly. Like share some more of that. Put some flesh on that for us.
ALDERN: Sure. Yeah. Well, and and some of this is speculative and some of it is very deeply grounded in contemporary neurobiology. So I can offer a little bit of both.
But before doing so, I'd, I'd also offer that, you know, again, with respect to the question of how the current political moment changes where we are and my kind of soft rejection of the premise there. You know, I'd also kind of softly reject the notion that our responses to climate change and the ones that we're talking about now at kind of that individual contemplative level, are somehow contingent on climate change occurring right again.
Climate change is very useful to me as a lens. But really, we're just, you know, the conversation that we're having, Sarah, is not about politics. It's not about climate change. It is about the fact that we are agents with conscious access to a model of the world, and that world is in flux all the time, irrespective of these climatological forcing factors that are of course, anthropogenic influenced, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, and as you know, as, the world continues in its grand flux, unsurprisingly, we should expect to, see our internal systems adjust accordingly.
And, the practices that we're discussing, mindfulness among them, I think, are one of the great tools to get there. And if it were the year 1925 instead of 2025, I'd hope that I'd be able to give the same advice with no knowledge of climate change. Because I would argue that these relational modes of being in the world, these mindful modes of awareness and presence, they are useful to us as beings. They're useful to us as agents, irrespective of those kind of broader dynamics.
So what do they look like? Why does something like mindfulness help? From a neurobiological perspective, one of the things that's important to remember is that rational thought, you know, critical thinking, executive control, all of the kind of evolutionarily new stuff in the brain. It's kind of happening in the front of the brain, this, this prefrontal cortex, that's kind of the evolutionarily newest region of the brain.
And it's and it's broken down into a couple chunks, you know, brain science is never really a matter of like brain area A does operation X and brain area B does operation Y. But there's a little truth to it here and there. And one of the things we know about the way the prefrontal cortex works is that you've got a region called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is, you know, one of the brain's maestro, it's one of those executive executive control areas. It's really active during these moments of critical decision making.
We also know that as one of these evolutionarily new regions, as one of the chunks of the brain, that, you know, is not responsible for something, argue more evolutionarily central, such as breathing or, you know, remaining upright. It's subject to being tossed to the curb, when you have to throw a little more metabolic energy into your brain to deal with something else.
Heat is one of those things. Heat is effectively a cognitive load on the brain. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to keep your brain cool in terms of like, keeping yourself alive. That's pretty darn essential. So when heat comes to town and your brain must necessarily cool itself, that implies that you're looking at a reallocation of resources. It also tends to imply that you're looking at some areas in the brain that are overworked relative to others.
And this is a long story that is, you know, meant to arrive at the the following point, which is it suggests that basically as ambient temperature increases, we see an overworked dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and we see resources in the brain being reallocated to things like thermoregulation. We see a breakdown of these functional networks of connectivity patterns in the brain that, again, are correlated with things like critical thinking and instead we see the resurgence of another chunk of the prefrontal cortex, which is called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the VPC receives inputs from what's called the limbic system in the brain. The limbic system contains things like the amygdala, right? These are your emotional centers. Again, we talked about these regions of the brain already. They're the things that are responsible for, among other, behaviors, impulsive behavior. And it's important that those behaviors exist, right?
But as we navigate the world in as adaptable manner as possible, the crux of the issue is the degree to which rational decision making, critical thought, etc. balance emotion, thought interception. How are you feeling? Impulsive behavior. And so without the application of extreme heat, we get a balance between impulsivity and rationality. You can think through a decision and how you feel about it. And you can decide accordingly with the exposure of something like extreme heat, you basically see an outsized influence of that limbic system on decision making. And that means, behaviorally speaking, impulsive choices. You're going to be more prone to respond in kind if you are, you know, encountering aggression out in the wild. You're also just more prone to interpret an otherwise benign interaction as aggressive, and indeed then therefore more likely to respond in kind out in the wild.
RAY: Or on a baseball pitch.
ALDERN: Yes. Yes. I mean, we have that's what your.
RAY: Example from your research is all about. The baseball pitch.
ALDERN: Totally we I mean, since it's like the, you know, 80s, psychologists have, you know, run study after study after study of like, okay, well, what if we put people in a hot room, you know, and turn up the heat and see if they're a little meaner to one another? And lo and behold, that does work.
But you also see, you know, some prints of this stuff, as you suggest on the baseball pitch, pitchers are more likely to hit batters of the opposite team intentionally with their pitches on hotter days. Immigration judges are more likely to reject asylum applicants on hotter days. There are more union grievances filed in the US Postal Service. On hotter days, there are more incidents, you know, EEO complaints with respect to racial or sexual harassment on hotter days. We also see in an animal kingdom, by the way. But we don't really need to go there. The fact of the matter is that when it's hotter out, yeah, living beings are more aggressive.
RAY: That amygdala reaction causes the behavior and outsizes the influence.
ALDERN: Behavior. Yeah. So mindfulness does the opposite of that.
RAY: Yeah. Right.
ALDERN: That's the short answer. Is that neurobiological? We understand about these regimes of breathwork of mindful awareness is that they help us set the reset button. Right. For all the manners in which something like heat almost randomizes the activity of some of these functional brain networks that help us make decisions in the world. Mindfulness helps us restore that connectivity.
We also know that, you know, just phenomenological speaking, awareness of the body, conscious awareness of the body is tremendously useful with respect to the way that we act in the world as a function of our awareness writ large. What I mean by that is, if you are aware in your conscious mind, not just in your subconscious mind, right? Of course, if I'm navigating the world and it's really hot outside, by definition, I'm going to feel hot. But it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to notice that I feel hot.
RAY: Right? That's a whole different thing.
ALDERN: Yeah. And the ability to attune toward the self, to recognize the state of the body and the state of the mind, and to position those states next to something like the state of the environment to look at all three, notice the manner in which they're related. Notice indeed how they may be reflected and your own actions.
I mean, that is the dream, right? That's that's, you know, to use a word that you used earlier, Sarah, that's the recapturing of agency. Right. If we imagine something like extreme heat as effectively stripping us of agency just a little bit in that it influence our decision making, you know, it kind of chips away at that block of free will. Mindfulness is something that helps us get it back. Mindfulness is something that affords us being able to make the decisions we, quote unquote, want to make in the world because we're able to position that sense of self and the sense of the body next to our experience of the world.
RAY: This reminds me of the famous Holocaust survivor, author, psychologist Viktor Frankl. His quote that goes something like, “between stimulus and response, there's a pause. And in that pause is my choice and freedom” or something like that. And that reminds me of exactly what you're saying, that you can kind of reclaim that little bit of free will that was chipped away by the environmental load on you.
Yes. Through mindfulness and exercises build that muscle of adaptation to build that resilience. And it also points to, I mean, a lot of people would say that mindfulness or that turn towards the self and you even use the word “interception”, which is something which is basically about your ability to become aware in that meta way of what's happening in your body, like the ability to feel your heart beating or ability to feel when something, when some kind of stimulus is coming in that's triggering something.
And to be able to have that deep connection that's to your body, but that's also to the earth to the more than human world, to the environment around you. That's something you captured beautifully in your chapter on language and how languages can capture some of that and build that muscle much more readily because it's part of your language, therefore it's part of your worldview, your epistemology, the way you see the world, how how you model the world, as you put it earlier, all of those things are beautifully strung together in this, like moment of agency.
I know that you're not saying that we don't therefore need to change politics. And you know, deregulation is just fine and deregulate all the way because I'll compensate that with my ability to avoid dysregulation. You know, I love this like deregulation dysregulation play here.
ALDERN: Yeah.
RAY: But you know, like, well there's a relationship there.
ALDERN: Yeah. Maybe you know, another salient point would be you kind of, you know, you can't ‘mindfulness’ your way out of a mosquito bite.
RAY: Yeah. Right. Exactly. And so, there's a play here. But actually I want to turn to this place where you really come with this agency. It's so beautiful. I'm going to actually read a passage here. This is in this section where you're talking about language and again, how mitigating climate change is hardly the goal of linguistics. You write, you say that there's “all kinds of activism and actions we can take our lives that are not don't look the way we think it looks,” you say, “but this is the grand lesson for all of us who don't live in the Arctic or work as social linguists on language revitalization. Our contributions to climate solutions to the effects of climate degradation on brain health all come from within, from our own strengths and predilections and opportunities. These solutions, those that we design in the interests of our mental and emotional resilience, don't require us to become ‘activists’ in the same sense of carrying a sign. They require us to actively notice the change as it creeps. They require us to become activists in our own lives.”
And that's sort of towards the end of your book. And I know you're sort of doing that sort of move in the arc of the book to kind of bring us back to some kind of sense of, oh, how do we recover from what he's just shared with us with all this? Yes.
ALDERN: And in fact and in fact, the sentence you read was, a function of my editor saying you kind of need to complete the grand arc of your book here.
RAY: Yes. Okay. So. Yeah, so.
ALDERN: So this is, in fact, what it's doing.
RAY: You didn't really want to say that is what you're saying. Yeah. No, I so, Yeah, I guess my question. Maybe I should turn this to you personally. You know, you've done this research a lot. There's a lot of evidence that people who are the scientists on the frontlines of environmental destruction, climate change, rising sea levels, whether they're scientists, whether they're journalists, whether they're, you know, just lay people inhabiting these places, that their intensity of their emotions around this stuff anxiety, depression, mental health, trauma. You have a beautiful chapter called “The Body Keeps a Storm,” which I love. So, you know, all of these people who are really looking at this stuff, you've done that in the book and you're asking, asking your reader to do it. And like you said, you sort of give them a bone at the end.
But what about for you? How is it that, you know, just personally and I'm not saying that you need to be the model for all of us and tell us how to do it, but I'm just quite curious, as a human and a messy human, given how intensely you're looking at these things, and I love what you say about how this doesn't have to be about climate change or politics at all. This is about kind of reclaiming a relationship with the earth. What is how does that look for you?
ALDERN: Yeah. I mean, I'm not the model of, contemplative.
RAY: Sure, sure.
ALDERN: You know, it's but but I think, yeah, I'm certainly not the model of contemplative health, but I will say that everything that I read and everyone I talked to, as, as a means of writing this book, I think encouraged me to think very deeply about those questions and, and, and kind of want to move in the direction of, of a healthier, let's call it emotional life. But I think that would include the word spiritual. I would include, indeed the word contemplative for me. You know, you spoke about that chapter, “The Body Keeps the Storm”, and one of the folks you meet in that chapter is a woman named Jyoti Mishra, who works in California and in particular studies trauma responses to extreme weather.
RAY: I should say that she's the first person on this show. So fabulous. Yeah. So we just talked to her. Yeah.
ALDERN: Even better. Yeah. So you will know that one of the things that she's shown is that, climate trauma in particular seems to act specifically, at least in her studies of wildfire survivors, for example, on something like Distractibility. Right. Basically the ability to maintain attention and also, it seems to be the case that practices of mindfulness breathwork regimes that her lab is studying appear to correct these losses of function. Well, when I, when I, when I look at evidence like that, I'm like, man, I should be doing that.
RAY: I need to do that now before I need it.
ALDERN: I should be doing. Yeah, I should be doing that yesterday. But again, this is this is, this is not you know, it's not magic. And it's also not unique to the study of climate change. Right. It's so much of what we know about, for example, for example, mindful attention comes from, you know, medical studies of ADHD, for example. Right. Right. We actually have a vast neurobiological literature on attention, perhaps unsurprisingly, and a lot of what we know about it maps onto the understandings that we are, kind of, you know, disintering from the rubble of climate trauma.
So I when I, when I come across studies like hers, and, and and when I read work, or have a conversation with a researcher who, you know, shows me another example of how a more, relational mode of experiencing the world, how a better knowledge of self may indeed bolster something like neurological resilience. I'm kind of just left thinking, well, gosh, why would I not try something like that?
RAY: Yeah, it's not it. It's not just, what I hear you saying is not just because I need to heal myself or protect myself from this.
In your book, you describe this kind of vicious cycle stuff, like, the more we disconnect and pretend that we can be disconnected from nature and that we're these autonomous beings that our brains like, you know, Cartesian thought, we're sort of are sort of separate from nature, that we're not porous, that we can override in with technology, whatever kinds of challenges nature throws at us.
All of that, you know, leads us to actually having inability to perceive these changes that are happening, interoception, etc., and that then creates all of these sort of like diminished brain functions, attention capacities that then will prevent us from being able to come up with larger solutions that would then prevent them in the first place, you know, or mitigate or adapt in the first place.
And so I see a sort of vicious cycle. You even have a vicious cycle around climate migration, displacing people from their homelands and the knowledges and languages of that, that then makes it harder for them to adapt to the changing climate in the new place.
I don't know, there are so many vicious cycles in your book, but the punchline being that there's an intervention here and the intervention is, as you just stated, better knowledge of the self and more relational modes of being in the world.
So and maybe we should try that and go to Jyoti’s point. And what you've just, you know, summarize her workthat the more we do that before we're under great distress where there's actually trauma in front of us, where we build that muscle, we are more able to handle the kind of scarier things as they come.
ALDERN: Yeah, yeah. And I don't pretend to be able to do any of those things on a day to day basis.
RAY: But you've researched it so you know the map.
ALDERN: But yeah, but I would profess to try. Yeah. And profess to try to live in those modes more and more frequently. Yeah. And I think that's kind of the best we can do.
RAY: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that's a very different response than to say it's all so big. The people in charge are failing us and throwing us to the dogs. As you said, I am just going to go and, you know, party until the rapture, you know, I mean, or whatever. There's lots of ways I see people respond. But what you're describing is not that right? I mean, it's both the medicine for the planet and the medicine for your brain.
ALDERN: Yes, yes. But I should also say, you know, it's also not not, you know, communist revolution, right? Which is, which is to say your, your political act, you know, to bring back and to bring back in the political right. It doesn't preclude you engaging in other activities in the world that feel a general right, that feel agency giving is if it's something like protest or something like political organizing is an outlet through which you feel you can affect change, by all means, go for it. Right?
To suggest that a mindful mode of being in the world is a solution to, as you perhaps, would, would say, you know, breaking the cycle. That isn't to suggest that it's the only thing you ought to do or the only possibility. Right? You know, I think, yeah, I, I'm just, you know, I want to be very clear that part of in my estimate of relational mode of being is indeed relating to other people. And I think the picture of mindfulness, at least in and a contemporary Western thought is, you know, a person sitting in kind of perfect yoga pose, alone in a room, right, or meditating in a forest. That's all well and good. We probably ought to be doing, you know, a lot more of that. And also relational modes of being implied, talking to people and imply being in the world with others.
And so, I would argue that, and this is where it gets a little bit speculative because I, I don't know, about the work being done in this space, though I'm sure it exists. There are probably ways of mindful democratic organizing. You know, there are probably modes of, you know, relational and mindful, political protest. What does that look like?
You know, I bet if you and I spent five minutes here brainstorming, we could probably delineate it a couple principles and ideas. But, like, I'm sure there are lots of people thinking about that question. And the point is, you know, the mindful awareness, a it's not a silver bullet, but B, it's not something that you leave in the comfort of your own home or reserve for that quiet space. Right? It is a mode of being with yourself. But that self is always in the world, and it is always in relation to other people and other beings. Yeah. And so you must bring it with you. This is not an invitation to self isolate.
RAY: Spiritual bypasses that they call it. Right. Like it's not you're not allowed to bypass just, the world's so tough. I'm going to go into my spiritual life.
ALDERN: Yes.
RAY: Right, right. Yeah. As an escapism. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yeah. No. I love the way you're describing it. It's I'm just. I am feeling incredible presence and, gratitude for this conversation. For all the reasons you're describing. Because this is, this is where is at for me, you know, how do we bring these the things that we do have some control over, to Viktor Frankl's point, of our inner lives, which feels like, what is the point of that in this mess of the world, and connecting it in so many important ways to the big mess of the world. So I appreciate that so much.
ALDERN: Well, you got to start with yourself.
RAY: Hey, that's all you got.
ALDERN: Seriously? I mean, it's I don't, you know, I don't know if, you've ever been in therapy, but my therapist tells me all the time, like, hey. Well, you know, you can't help others unless you help yourself first, right? If you don't have those stories of resilience, if you are not on your own two feet, how are you going to give energy to other people, even if you have the best intentions?
RAY: Yeah, yeah, yeah. How we show up, is beautiful. I think that you go there with yourself, even if you just did that in your book for your editor. So that's kind of cool. I appreciate that. Yeah. And I'm definitely in a mode right now of what I love what you've said about we need to be doing this work regardless. And I think that that's really for me, one of the take-home things is that this is medicine for ourselves, medicine for the planet, regardless of who is in office, regardless of even climate change. I love that you said this is not magic and it doesn't even relate to climate change. Yeah, it's so funny because the title of this podcast, this radio show is Climate Magic. So that's like.
ALDERN: Yeah, that's my favorite thing.
RAY: Perfect. Let's just challenge all that stuff. To come to kind of I could talk to you all day, but to come to some kind of a head here, what are some organizations or projects or research or people that are doing this kind of work around helping us understand how a changing climate or how the environment affects our brains and our how important our inner work is for the for healing all of this. Yeah. What would you want to, you know, give some shine on or or we might want to know more about.
ALDERN: Yeah. Well, I, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that I worked for a nonprofit climate news organization called Grist, where we don't focus exclusively on mindful awareness. But, we do write about all the manners in which a changing climate is to be found embedded everywhere in our lives. So if you're interested in reporting on climate and climate justice and climate solutions, I would direct you to good old Grist.org.
RAY: Love it. Yeah. Love Grist.
ALDERN: There's a budding group with which I'm involved called the Neuroclimate Working Group. It's, at the moment, sponsored by the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia and consists of neurologists, cognitive scientists, clinicians, epidemiologists, for some reason, me.
RAY: Recovering neuroscientist.
ALDERN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. A group of, you know, something on the order of gosh, I don't even know 150 folks now meeting monthly to discuss these questions, to discuss the fact that there are manifold intersections between climadte, health and neurological health. Why don't we consider braiding them together and think about climatological and neurological health?
That’s one, so the neuroclimate working group is worth taking a peak at, not least because I think it's going to start publishing some cool stuff in the coming months.
These specific intersections, you know, are kind of at an organizational level, few and far between, unfortunately. And that's part of the problem, right? The fact that, you know, everywhere we look in terms of climate policymaking or climate economics, while we do have efforts to integrate, you know, a handful of public health concerns into our modeling, brain health is basically never on the table. It's not.
And, you know, that's to say nothing of what we discussed with respect to productivity losses, you know, or indeed, you know, absenteeism, right? If you experience a natural disaster and can't go into work, you know, that's bad for the company's bottom line. I hate to, you know, put it in those terms, but unfortunately, those are the terms, that that a lot of cost benefit analysis are predicated on, and so we, we ought to be taking account of this stuff, and we're not, which is a long way of saying, if you can point me in the direction of an institution that, wants to do that, I'm all ears.
But the problem is we're not really taking neurological health into account. When we're thinking about climate policy. So that's a challenge.
That said, I would point to maybe just one more resource that is a little far afield. It's called the Active Inference Institute. And, it consists of as I understand it, an informal group of scholars, and, and, thinkers and activists, who are interested in the manner in which this particular field of contemporary neuroscience, known as active inference, influences the rest of our thinking about the world. You encounter active inference in chapter. Gosh, I don't know, seven or so in my book in which we talk about, a neuroscientist named Karl Friston and his notion of the free energy principle. The free energy principle governs this notion that we laid out at the beginning of the conversation the fact that the brain exists to model the world and that it seeks to effectively, in that modeling effort, reduce uncertainty about the world.
Free energy is effectively a measure of surprisal that you encounter when, when met with information. And the goal of the brain is to minimize surprise. So, for instance, work on the free energy principle, has has influenced a whole legion of neuroscientists, who are thinking about the manner in which we ought not consider the brain to be this computational mechanism that just takes inputs and kind of converts them into insights and then produces outputs as a matter of those insights. Right? It is not a processing machine in that way. Instead, it is an active predicting engine. It's a prediction engine that is always trying to predict what's happening in the world. But be trying to predict the outcome of our own actions and then observing when we act what the outcome actually was, and adjusting our models accordingly such that the next time we act, we have a better idea of what's going to happen.
RAY: So this ties back to everything you're saying about baseline syndrome and memory and forgetting.
ALDERN: Yeah, exactly. And, you know, some of that stuff is, is quite mathematically dense.
RAY: And to sort that through and write this summary and graphs. Yeah.
ALDERN: And, and so you know that the Active Inference Institute, you know, yeah. Perhaps isn't for everyone and especially, perhaps not for those who are feeling particularly allergic to mathematics. And at the same time, you know, lots of resources there that are not particularly mathematically dense. And the only reason I bring it up is because, this notion of active inference, this notion of, you know, effectively the brain as a prediction machine and one that is not only seeking to model the world, but also model the body and model the outcome of our actions and knit all of those interactions together into a model that can guide our behavior in the most effective relational means possible. That's what they're doing. And I would argue it's also what we're talking about.
Yeah, if we're interested in living less in the world as individual selves, walled off from external influence and instead interested in, embodying what contemporary neuroscientists believe to be the case, I think it would behoove us to take a look at the processes that underlie those interactions and modeling efforts. And it appears to be the case that active inference is kind of the name of the game. So I'm, I'm really compelled, by that field of inquiry right now. And, it seems to me that there's a lot to learn, not just about the world through it, but also about, you know, ourselves.
RAY: You know, one of the things that I often find myself saying is, we have a lot of science on climate. We have a lot of science on natural resources. We have a lot we know how to measure those things, and we've got a lot of data. But what we forget is that there's the sciences, if you will, of ourselves, of our brains, of our lives that are actually where I think so much of the action really needs to be. And you just made a really beautiful case for that and you do throughout your book. So I really appreciate it. The last question I have is where can people find out more about what you're doing and what you're producing and what's coming up for you?
ALDERN: Gosh, I don't know. I'm on Blue Sky now. Yeah.
RAY: And so I so appreciate their algorithm rejections. Yes. Yes. Sorry. Yeah. Shout out to blue sky.
ALDERN: Monitor blue sky where my handle is compatibilism, and my website has my name on it. Yeah.
RAY: It was really nice to talk to you. I loved it.
ALDERN: Yeah. Likewise. Thanks so much for having me.
RAY: That was Clayton Page Aldern, neuroscientist turned environmental journalist with Grist magazine and author of The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains. Show notes can be found at KHSU.org.
I'm Sarah Ray, and thanks for listening to Climate Magic, produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.
