Special Episode: Clayton Page Aldern & The Weight of Nature

Already this summer, heatwaves are causing thousands of deaths across the world, catastrophic flooding threatens millions, wildfires rage across enormous swathes of the globe, many regions face extreme drought conditions, and a very strong El Niño is predicted for later this year, leading to further climate chaos. It’s a lot to take in. The devastating consequences of climate change can be measured any number of ways, and in this week’s book club episode, we delve into some of the more insidious and less explored impacts: those on our cognition, our mental health, our brains, and our behavior. In The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes our Brains https://bookshop.org/a/3175/9780593472743, author Clayton Page Aldern https://claytonaldern.com/, neuroscientist and journalist who leads the data journalism program at Grist https://grist.org/, presents a compelling and sweeping examination of the many unseen ways that climate change is changing us. Why do we have a shorter fuse when it’s hot outside? How are our memories and language impacted by our changing climate? What pathogens pose a greater threat to our brains as the climate warms? And most importantly, how can we begin to process these effects on our inner selves? Tune in to find out. Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAu See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  Hi, I'm Erin Welsh, and this is This Podcast Will Kill You. You're listening to the latest episode in the TPWKY Book Club series, a series featuring interviews with authors of popular science and medicine books. We've really gotten to showcase a wide variety of topics on this series, from the story of leaded gasoline, to the spread of disease in institutionalized settings, from the discovery of a cure for tuberculosis, to the pervasiveness of syphilis in early modern London. There truly is something for everyone in these episodes. And if you'd like to see the full range of titles that we've featured on this series, as well as ones that we're planning to cover in future episodes, head on over to our website,

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  thispodcastwillkillyou.com. There, in addition to finding other goodies, like transcripts and references for all of our episodes, you'll find a link to our bookshop.org affiliate page under the Extras tab. On Bookshop, you'll see several podcast-related lists, including one for this book club and one for the TPWKY Kids Book Club, which Erin Updike posts on our socials. So if you're not already following us there, you really should be. We always say it, but it's always true. We love hearing from you all, so please don't hesitate to reach out. Whether it's a book suggestion, episode suggestion, firsthand account, or just random

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  thoughts you want to share, send them our way. The best way to get in touch is through the Contact Us form, or the Submit Your Firsthand Account form on our website. Two last things before moving on to the Book of the Week, and that is to please rate, review, and subscribe. We'd love to keep making this podcast forever, and that really helps us out. And finally, you can now find full video versions of most of our newest episodes on YouTube. Make sure you're subscribed to the Exactly Right Media YouTube channel, so you never miss a new episode drop.

• 4:30Speaker 07

  The word unprecedented has taken on an almost menacing tone. Rarely does it mean that something wonderful has happened. More often, unprecedented or record-breaking seems to signify a grim outcome, a new low for our society or our planet. I read this week's book club pick while in the midst of an unprecedentedly warm and record-breaking dry winter in Denver, Colorado, where I live. Wearing a t-shirt and shorts to walk my dog during months when I'm usually shoveling snow off the sidewalk, that lost its novelty pretty quickly. It turns out it's tough to enjoy abnormally warm, snow-free, sunny winter days, when

• 5:12Speaker 07

  you know what it means for wildfire risk and drought conditions in an already parched region of this country. I wasn't alone in this. Everywhere I went, people remarked on the record-breaking weather, each conversation steeped in concern. As this week's book reveals, the climate anxiety that we were feeling is just one way that climate alters how we experience the world. In The Weight of Nature: How a Change in Climate Changes Our Brains, award-winning journalist and trained neuroscientist Clayton Page Aldern explores the profound impact that warming temperatures have on our decision-making, our cognitive abilities, our exposure to certain pathogens, even our propensity for violence.

• 5:57Speaker 07

  Aldern, who is a senior data reporter at GRIST, an independent nonprofit news source for climate change and the environment, travels beyond the well-trodden ground of climate anxiety to bring readers a richly detailed perspective of the intersection between brain, behavior, and climate. How do hot days impact legal immigration decisions? What do hurricanes and wildfires do to our memories and trauma response? Where might we see more disease as temperatures warm? The Weight of Nature takes readers on a journey spanning disciplines and decades to present an eye-opening account of this public health crisis, and offers some hope for ways that we can better bear this weight.

• 6:42Speaker 07

  I am very excited to share my conversation with Clayton with you all, so let's just take a quick break and get started.

• 7:12Speaker 07

  Clayton, thank you so much for joining me today.

• 7:14Speaker 08

  It's so lovely to be here, Erin. Thanks.

• 7:17Speaker 07

  In your book, The Weight of Nature, you explore how our change in climate is profoundly impacting our brains beyond climate anxiety. From the worsening of critical thinking skills on hotter days, to the association between depression and degraded landscapes, this is a relatively unexplored, yet truly eye-opening and alarming aspect of climate change. Can you take me through the journey of this book? Like, how did it take shape?

• 7:45Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, happy to. And thanks for your kind words. This is some occasionally frightening territory, but as I hope I make clear in the text, I don't think this needs to be a story of doom. You know, the book arose from a sense of curiosity that I kind of couldn't jettison, right? I was working initially as a neuroscientist. I was a lab tech in a computational neuroscience lab. And across my desk were coming these papers. This is back in 2015 or so, both from Stanford behavioral economists and also from the Department of Defense, these really interesting reports that suggested there was this relationship

• 8:28Speaker 08

  between climate and conflicts, which, again, if you have these types of authors correcting for all of the relevant sociodemographic confounders under the sun, right? Income and race, et cetera, et cetera. It seemed to be the case that there was this marginal effect that stuck around, that illustrated some kind of relationship between temperature and violence. And as a neuroscientist at the time, I just kind of couldn't get this out of my head. This was kind of an alarm bells moment, right? Like, what could possibly be going on here? And we have, as folks who navigate this world, a general intuitive sense that this kind of thing might be true, right? When it's hotter outside, we maybe all feel a little quicker to the trigger, for example.

• 9:14Speaker 08

  I certainly do. And yet, I hadn't seen a lot of research into the mechanism underlying how that behavioral effect might come to manifest. That moment for me kicked off a multi-year research project. I ultimately left academic neuroscience and went into journalism. I work for an environmental magazine now. And the marriage of those fields effectively is this book for me. And it's a book that seeks to account for both a kind of cataloging of the effects in question, as well as a mechanistic understanding thereof, to the extent that we can get there. So as you suggested, this is not necessarily a book about climate anxiety, per se, which

• 9:57Speaker 08

  is not to suggest that climate anxiety isn't real or isn't important. But I've sought to go beyond that framework and really dive into what it means for a changing environment to bear on our neurobiology, our behavior, our cognition, et cetera, et cetera. And the weight of nature is an argument for, indeed, the fact that this weight is all around us, kind of forcing our hand in ways that we might not otherwise imagine if we're not paying attention to it.

• 10:25Speaker 07

  Early on in your book, you introduce this essential framing of climate in relation to memory and expectation. We can only describe our climate as changing if we have a baseline by which to measure that change. And when we detect that change, it disrupts our memories. Are the winters of our childhood truly the winters of our childhood? Have things changed? Or are we just misremembering things? And I was hoping you could say more about shifting baselines and climate change and amnesia and how these things are all kind of intersecting.

• 10:59Speaker 08

  There's a lot of kind of strange epistemological fluidity here. And I think we can kind of ground ourselves by reminding ourselves what it is that brains do, what they're for, why do organisms have nervous systems at all? And the first point to make is that we ought to understand the brain as a statistical model of the environment. We ought to understand it as a generative model that allows the organism that has access to this nervous system to represent that outside world in such a way that they can navigate it successfully. We need to understand what constitutes normal if we are to continue persisting in time.

• 11:41Speaker 08

  And given that biological imperative, what you see across the board in terms of what it is that organisms with brains and brain-like structures, and frankly, organisms that persist in time but don't even have brains, do. And what they do is they measure the distance between what they expect to happen any given moment, what their model suggests is going to happen, and indeed, what actually happens. And when there's a mismatch between those things, when there's a mismatch between expectation and perception, well, you can do one of two things to get your model in line. You can either update your model to match the perception, or you can act.

• 12:24Speaker 08

  You can change your perception effectively, whether through movement or by exerting some additional pressure on the world, whatever it may be. But the point is, you have this action-perception loop that necessarily interfaces with the world. And you sense that world and you act on it. And the world receives your actions as its own sensations. That's part of the kind of beautiful reciprocity of this framework, this modeling framework. Let's just put a pin in that and say, yes, the brain is a model. What's the other thing that we need to do here to kind of wrap our heads around this climate question? And the other move is arguably to suggest that there's no real thing as the climate.

• 13:07Speaker 08

  The climate doesn't exist in the sense that we can put our hand out there and touch it. When rain falls on our hand and we feel those raindrops from the sky, that's real, that's happening. Weather is real. It may be ephemeral, but it's a tangible thing. Climate, on the other hand, sounds a lot more like this modeling stuff that we were just talking about. Arguably, it's a cultural construct. It's the definition of normality for any given point in time and space. Climate, as understood, both in common parlance and literally by definitions offered by places like the World Meteorological Organization, suggests that it's an average. It is an arbitrary human construct.

• 13:50Speaker 08

  Over a given period of time, let's say 30 years, over a given period of space, let's say, I don't know, 10 kilometers by 10 kilometers. And expectation, as it were, our model of what's happening in that chunk of time and space, is what helps us calibrate how we interact with that chunk of time and space. So if we didn't have a model of the world that was grounded in this climatological sense that we call, quote unquote, "climate," we wouldn't be able to make plans as a function of our experience with the natural world. We wouldn't be able to plan agricultural seasons, for example. We need to have these grounded generative expectations about the environment if we want

• 14:34Speaker 08

  to navigate this world successfully. So those are the two really important building blocks here, that we can understand our brain as a model, and we can understand the climate as cultural. We can understand the climate as an expectation. And if you have neurological machinery that is all about calibrating expectations relative to perception, and if the climate, as commonly understood, is changing, which indeed it is, it should be no surprise that your generative model, that your nervous system changes in kind to reflect that reality. And this is where the memory stuff and the amnesia stuff enters into play.

• 15:14Speaker 08

  If you just remembered everything that had ever happened to you, especially climatologically speaking, you wouldn't be able to adapt to the new world as it unfolds. So in fact, we ought to be forgetting the ways that the world currently isn't if we want to navigate the new world successfully. And so you kind of have this little voice in your ear whispering these little tidbits of amnesia as you move through a climate changed world, kind of suggesting in this insidious manner, well, it's actually always felt like this. This is the definition of normal. This is the thing that we need to prepare for. And so we're kind of fighting the climate battle on two fronts. There's the real exterior world, and then there's the stuff that that exterior world

• 15:58Speaker 08

  does to our representation of that world, our definition of what constitutes normal.

• 16:03Speaker 07

  Let's take a quick break. And when we get back, there's still so much to discuss.

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  Lisa, we should tell them about our new show.

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  Oh, my God, Lexi, we have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me.

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  I'm Lexi Iwanu. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart.

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  And I'm Lisi DiGiulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all.

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• 19:24Speaker 07

  Welcome back, everyone. I've been chatting with Clayton Page Aldern about his book, The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains. Let's get back into things. I feel like that is so important in raising awareness of the impact of climate change and what is actually happening, rather than falling prey to the boiling frog syndrome. We're just like, yeah, things are changing gradually and gradually, but you know what? We're here now, so we forget that what it was like. But moving on to one of the other aspects that you talk about and that you touched on earlier is this impact of heat on our cognitive function.

• 20:05Speaker 07

  So when it's hot out, we feel like our brains don't work as well. Our thoughts are sluggish. We make mistakes. Our memory suffers. It feels more effortful overall than when it's cooler. And as you describe in your book, this is a real measurable phenomenon, observed as early as the 1940s, I believe. What did these early studies and then subsequent research reveal when it comes to the impact of rising temperatures on cognitive function?

• 20:33Speaker 08

  If we go back to the 1940s, as you suggested, there are these studies coming out of World War II wherein, you know, you had these telegraphy operators who are baking in a Cambridge lab, effectively being asked by a researcher to do their jobs or to transcribe the Morse code that's coming in on these machines. And meanwhile, the guy in the hallway is kind of cranking the heat up. And, you know, lo and behold, these are experts at their job. And also, as the temperature increasers, they become less good at that job, right? They're making errors in their transcriptions. And it's that kind of study that has followed us from the 40s, you know, through to psychology labs in the 1980s, where similarly, again, folks are tossing people into labs and turning up the heat

• 21:16Speaker 08

  and watching what happens. We've done this for decades. And lo and behold, at higher temperatures, people are more impulsive, they're more aggressive, they're less critical thinkers, right? They're less rational. And it seems to be the case that there's a through line through a variety of behavioral effects that we observe that comes down to a handful of mechanistic explanations that, you know, tend to layer on themselves to produce what we observe. It's stuff like the fact that we have effectively a fixed amount of attentional resources. And one of the things that's really important to remember about the brain is that it's sensitive, right? The tissue itself is extremely sensitive. It's physical stuff.

• 22:01Speaker 08

  It operates within a narrow band of, you know, environmental ambient temperature. And therefore, when you see that temperature spike outside, you've got to put extra metabolic energy inside into cooling that tissue. So, you know, your brain basically doesn't melt. When that's happening, you're necessarily sapping resources from elsewhere, right? Because again, you have fixed attentional load, right? There's only so much metabolic energy that you can devote to some of these kind of higher order principles like critical thinking or attending to things in space. And when you need to do more fundamental things, like cool down your brain, some of that metabolic energy has to go to that job

• 22:44Speaker 08

  at the expense of some of the stuff that has developed, you know, more recently in evolutionary timescales. In practice, in terms of the systems neuroscience at play, what that means is, you know, basically, you've got a couple of regions in the front of your brain, this dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is really all about some of the stuff we've been talking about, critical thinking, rational thought, all of these things that we love to imagine are hallmarks of humanity. Right next to it, you've got the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. And this is still PFC, right? This is still evolutionarily new stuff that basically only humans have. But it receives inputs from elsewhere in the brain. It's not necessarily all about

• 23:26Speaker 08

  that kind of executive function situation. It's more about like emotion, right, and impulsivity insofar as it's receiving inputs from places like the limbic system, places like the amygdala. And when you make decisions in a healthy environment, those two brain regions in your prefrontal cortex, they're interacting, right? You're balancing quote unquote rationality with quote unquote emotionality. And the best decisions come out of that balance. But in extreme heat, as your blood-brain barrier is doing all kinds of things, as your metabolic energy is basically being rerouted such that you're cooling your brain down, as the connectivity between brain regions is starting to look a little scrambled,

• 24:08Speaker 08

  that balance becomes skewed. And what we see in those moments is an outsized role of the VM PFC on decision making. As the DL PFC is overworked, the VM PFC effectively takes over. And in practice, for decision making, what does that mean? Well, it means your decisions are going to look more impulsive. You will literally be a less critical thinker. You're going to be quicker to the trigger. You're going to be just zooming through a test that you're taking in that hot room. You're going to be saying things that maybe with a more level head you wouldn't have said. And we see, again, this play out across

• 24:47Speaker 08

  the income spectrum, across the animal spectrum. We see it in all kinds of roles, professional and otherwise, right? And I think it is a reminder of the human animal selves that we are, the fact that just like the monkeys in the zoo and just like the fish that are swimming around, you know, we're in a lab of our own. And when you crank up the temperature, the same results manifest.

• 25:13Speaker 07

  Right. And this is not just something that we feel, something that is like, oh, yeah, you know, I don't know why I said that. Maybe I was just like, it was so hot that day. This has been measured, not only just like cognitive function impairment, but also violence being increased on days when it's warmer. Can you take me through some of the studies that show this link between increased temperatures and violence?

• 25:39Speaker 08

  To go back to the 80s, one of the ways that folks tested this initially was basically by sitting in the bushes as cars rolled up to an intersection. And there was a test subject who was idling in a car when the light turned green, an observer in the bushes holding a clipboard, watching the car behind the test subject. And lo and behold, on hotter days and hotter moments, and especially for cars that had their windows rolled down, all of a sudden, you saw honking behavior increase, right? These cars that were stuck behind the idling vehicle unwittingly were angrier more quickly. They were holding their horn for longer. They were more likely to kind of scream expletives. And again, there

• 26:24Speaker 08

  was this effect multiplier that showed if you had your windows open, which is to suggest probably you were exposed to the high ambient temperatures because you didn't have air conditioning in your vehicle. Indeed, those folks saw increased effect sizes as well. So there are these breadcrumbs that start in the psychology labs around aggression. You see this play out today in studies that have looked at things like baseball pitchers, who are more prone to retaliate in terms of throwing a pitch intentionally at a batter of the other team if a batter on their own team has already been hit by a stray pitch. So as temperatures increase, pitchers are more likely to aggressively retaliate. This

• 27:08Speaker 08

  is true in a handful of sports. We see more aggressive penalties in football. It's true at the postal service, right? So Harvard economist a year or two ago did this big study of harassment claims that were filed under equal opportunity at the postal service. And they looked at both indoor and outdoor workers. Again, at higher temperatures, you saw more harassment. So we see this in the professional environment. We see study after study documenting that risks of things like online hate speech, things like what we might call intra-personal violence, things like domestic assault, domestic abuse, right?

• 27:50Speaker 08

  All of these really awful patterns tick up when folks are exposed to relative deviations in temperature.

• 27:58Speaker 07

  And it's not just our cognitive function that takes a hit as the temperature warms. It's also many other aspects of health, as you describe. For instance, the associations between neurodegenerative disease and cyanobacteria blooms is a really compelling associations and alarming, of course, as everything is compelling and alarming. What is the hypothesized relationship between those two? And where does the research currently stand in this area?

• 28:26Speaker 08

  Right. Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, these things have been around for billions of years. And, you know, you've seen them. They hang out in fresh and brackish water. There are these blue-green mats that appear on the surface. And perhaps you've heard that, you know, it's not a good idea to swim in the mats or let your dog near them or anything because they are toxic in some capacity. True. And there are a lot of different flavors of cyanobacteria out there. What we're learning about a handful of them is that in addition to producing a neurotoxin, which is called beta-methylamino alanine, or BMAA, in addition to producing this neurotoxin that is indeed released into water, It appears that the neurotoxin itself is probably airborne.

• 29:11Speaker 08

  And so folks who live on the perimeter of these lakes, the perimeter of this brackish water, may also be exposed to aerosols containing BMAA. And this is dangerous because heck of a lot of lab studies have shown relationships between BMAA exposure, both oral and through the nose, right, nasal, have these relationships with excitotoxicity, cell death, neurodegeneration. BMAA exposure is, you know, one of the primary causal predictors of rates of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, motor neuron disease. It's been implicated in the development of things like Parkinsonianism, Alzheimer's.

• 29:56Speaker 08

  And the real dangerous thing here, when it comes to a change in climate, is that these blooms are increasing in size and frequency as a function of climate change, right? What do they need to survive? They need sunlight. Well, we got that. They need a well-balanced pool of water, and it is being well-balanced by the fact that, you know, synthetic fertilizer is running off from agriculture operations and effectively fertilizing everything it touches as it's loosed into streams and rivers and ends up, you know, in these lakes. That balances the nitrogen phosphorus ratio in a manner that the cyanobacteria love. And then you need warm water, and the climate is also warming the water.

• 30:39Speaker 08

  And you've got a little loop back as well, that as a function of more and extreme storms, you're going to see more and more of the fertilizer in question, loosed into the streams and rivers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we know globally that cyanobacteria blooms are increasing in both size and frequency. And what's been hypothesized, and for which there are very compelling studies underway looking at, is unfortunately, we would expect to see an increase in ALS and Alzheimer's mortality as a function of bloom frequency. We don't know enough at the global level. We don't know enough even at the national level right now in terms of the epidemiology. But I'll tell you what, cyanobacteria are everywhere on Earth at a global scale, could

• 31:22Speaker 08

  potentially wreak some real havoc over the next decades.

• 31:27Speaker 07

  Let's take a quick break here. We'll be back before you know it.

• 31:31Speaker 09

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• 32:03Speaker 10

  Lisa, we should tell them about our new show.

• 32:07Speaker 11

  Oh, my God, Lexi, we have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me.

• 32:11Speaker 10

  I'm Lexi Iwanu. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart.

• 32:16Speaker 11

  And I'm Lisi DiGiulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all.

• 32:25Speaker 12

  I'm not going to get into your fighting. That is wild. I learned that about you today.

• 32:32Speaker 10

  Now in my 30s, being the founder of New Shoes, good taste is my business, and I've always got something to say.

• 32:39Speaker 13

  If men were just honest about this, there would be so much more peace in the world.

• 32:43Speaker 11

  We're going to talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older.

• 32:47Speaker 10

  And a little wiser.

• 32:48Speaker 11

  We're best friends, but we don't always agree.

• 32:51Speaker 12

  Because you told us how accommodating you are.

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  Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight.

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  Don't lie to me.

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  Don't lie to me.

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  The stewardesses were so beautiful.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  But in reality, the stewardess job is far less glamorous than it appears.

• 33:34Speaker 14

  It was the most sexist job I think you could have.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  In this era, the airlines told these stewardesses, they have to be single. They had no good excuse for why they wouldn't let women be married. They have to be skinny.

• 33:54Speaker 14

  We were starving ourselves.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  And they have to be young. You would retire at age 32. But one day, a group of stewardesses said...

• 34:05Speaker 14

  This has got to stop.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  They risked it all, turning a fight for fairness into a revolution. Listen to The Girlfriends: Flight or Fight on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 34:34Speaker 07

  Welcome back, everyone. I'm here chatting with Clayton Page Aldern about his book, The Weight of Nature: How a Change in Climate Changes Our Brains. Let's get into some more questions. In your chapter, Spilling, you tell the heartbreaking story of Philip Gompf, which we actually featured on this podcast several years ago. Philip's death was due to Neignacaria fowleri, also known in the popular media as the brain-eating amoeba. And his death was an extremely rare event, although research is suggesting that it's becoming less rare overall, in part due to a warming climate. How might climate change influence the incidence of this amoebic infection?

• 35:15Speaker 08

  Yeah, and I was so grateful for your reporting on that front. By nature of, you know, primary amoebic encephalitis being quite rare, these stories are few and far between. But, you know, to go back to that storytelling component that we tipped at the beginning, they're essential, right? We need to be able to ground this conversation in reality. And it certainly inspired me to both look into Philip's story, but also, you know, other unfortunate members of his cohort, right? This is a rare disease, but it is not negligibly rare. And as you suggest, it is only likely to increase. These are free-living amoebi, which is to suggest they swim around in water.

• 35:58Speaker 08

  And almost similar to the cyanobacteria case, they have these moments in their lives in which they almost enter a state of kind of suspended animation. People don't even know how long they can live in a state of suspended animation. But the point is, they can. And all of a sudden, when that temperature gradient, that chemical gradient, starts to look a little more like it's going to cater to the stuff that they like to eat, they wake up. And Neignacaria fowleri are one of these organisms that, as with most things in life, have a preferred thing that they tend to go after for nutrients. That thing happens to be neural tissue. And so if you, as a young boy, as young boys are wont to do in the summer, jump into

• 36:43Speaker 08

  a lake, you may be more likely, with increasing temperatures, to end up with one of these things in your nose. And that's how they make it into the brain, right? They enter effectively through the nasal cavity, through the cribiform plate. There's basically a root up to the optic nerve. They can hitch a ride, such that they cross the blood-brain barrier in that manner, and then they start munching. And the problem with Neignacaria fowleri is that because these infections are considered to be quite rare, when somebody shows up at an ER with symptomology consistent with primary amoebic encephalitis, it often isn't recognized as such. It's recognized, you know, maybe as some kind of meningitis, they're going to throw a bacterial assay at it.

• 37:27Speaker 08

  Meanwhile, if you're really coming down with this stuff, you've got maybe five days to live, and the cocktail of, you know, antifungal antibiotics, et cetera, et cetera, that seem to be the current best chance at keeping you alive, need to be administered very quickly. And so we've got kind of two problems here. One is that a rare disease is probably increasing in frequency, and two, it's doing so amidst this kind of medical education context that isn't really set up to recognize symptomology as it presents in the ER. So that's some double danger there. And the real unfortunate chunk of this story is that while this is rare, we're probably

• 38:10Speaker 08

  looking at an undercount because of that fact, number two, because of the fact that we're not used to diagnosing this kind of disease. I spoke with a researcher while reporting this chapter, who, you know, mentioned the fact that there was a single ER doc in, I think, a hospital in Pakistan, you know, who recorded something like, I don't know, a dozen or 20 cases of Neignacaria fowleri infection in one year. And that happened to be a place where somebody knew what they were doing, they were collecting good data, they recognized what was happening, and wrote it all down. And you know, the researcher I was talking to was like, that's just not happening elsewhere. And it's safe to assume that infection rates are probably already a couple X higher than

• 38:54Speaker 08

  what we consider them to be today.

• 38:57Speaker 07

  And that is, that is just one still relatively rare, but likely increasing pathogen. There's also the, the other diseases that can be transmitted by vectors, for instance, mosquitoes, ticks, midges, whose ranges are expanding. And then there are these disruptions with extreme weather events also changing the, the dynamics, the ecology of these vector borne diseases. And as much as I would love to dig more into that, I do want to also talk about the impacts of climate change on our mental health. The scars that climate change is leaving on us are more than physical.

• 39:39Speaker 07

  There's PTSD you talk about as a consequence of living through traumatic events like hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, floods, all of which are of course on the rise due to climate change. What is the anticipated impact of climate change on mental health or mental health issues in the upcoming decades?

• 40:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, great question. And I don't know if anybody's put real numbers to it, but I'll tell you what, when folks looked at, for example, the Paradise Fire, really awful California fire from a couple of years ago, and set to assess the extent to which folks may be developing post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD-like symptomology as a function of exposure to the fire. What they found was basically if you didn't lose any personal property or experience the fire per se, you were probably something on the order of fine when it comes to PTSD. If you knew somebody else who lost personal property, or God forbid, a family member,

• 40:43Speaker 08

  or, or you witnessed something happen, your PTSD rate relative to that first group goes up by like 3X. If you then, in the final bucket here, lost personal property or a family member yourself, like directly experienced the fire in question, your rate of PTSD was up another 3X relative to that middle group. So, direct exposure to extreme weather, direct exposure to climate disaster matters when it comes to the development of PTSD. This is probably not surprising, right? We, we know, for example, that something like half of low end comparisons after Hurricane Katrina had symptomology consistent with PTSD.

• 41:24Speaker 08

  We see this with respect to earthquakes, we see it with respect to floods, with respect to drought. This is, this is kind of well understood. And, and so to me, it's almost beside the point to think about what's the net numerical impact going to be over a decade per se? And more, a question of are we recognizing that these effects are real? Are we attributing the appropriate weight to the findings and to these experiences, given the fact that indeed, they're only going to become more frequent going forward, irrespective of what that actual number looks like? You know, and furthermore, there are knock on effects here, right?

• 42:07Speaker 08

  I spoke for a long time with a colleague of mine named Yoko Nomura, who's a neuropsychologist at CUNY. And one of her studies, which takes place kind of in the context of Hurricane Sandy, right, Superstorm Sandy, you know, effectively looked at the difference between children who were conceived after Hurricane Sandy or born before it, relative to those who were in utero when the storm hit. And when these children were born, she followed them for the first, you know, 10 years of life or so. And it turns out that by age six, right, preschool age, the cohort of children who

• 42:46Speaker 08

  had been in the womb when the hurricane struck were intensely more likely to exhibit cognitive behavioral deficits, things, you know, or neuropsychiatric symptoms associated with things like anxiety, depression, OCD, conduct disorder, ADHD, right? And we're not talking like, oh, 15% more likely. It was like 10X, 15X, 20X more likely for very, very young children to be showing signs of something like depression relative to those who'd not been exposed to that hurricane in the womb. So that's a hint that when we talk about quote unquote, "mental health," yes, phenomenologically,

• 43:31Speaker 08

  these experiences manifest as mental experiences. They feel real in the way that all experiences do. There are also physical effects, right? Because you kind of can't get that cross generational trauma transfer without a physical mechanism. And, and what Dr. Nomura suggests is, well, there's probably something epigenetic going on. And that's the kind of stuff that, to me, we just really don't have a bead on, right? There's no good study out there that tries to estimate the burden of what we're looking at over the next 50 years or so. But, but you can kind of run the numbers in your own head and it's a little bit grim.

• 44:13Speaker 07

  Your book, The Weight of Nature, I feel like we've, at this point, we've touched on what that weight is, but was hoping you could tell me a little bit more about how we can push back against the weight of nature. Like, how do you push back or maintain balance or build the strength to carry that weight? What is the right strategy? Do we drop it? Do we carry it? Do we get stronger? Do we try to lessen the weight? How do we move forward?

• 44:42Speaker 08

  Yeah. Well, gosh, I, I certainly try to remain something of a solutions oriented optimist, as it were. I think what we can't do is ignore what's happening. We can't set it down. I think that the most important thing that we can do is indeed bear witness to this weight, to carry it with us, acknowledge what's happening, maintain awareness of change, and witness our own reaction, both at the individual level and the societal level. I mean, I kind of think awareness is everything. If we go back to the studies of post-traumatic stress, for example, and, and the specific

• 45:25Speaker 08

  deficits that we see, you know, in the case of something like the Camp Fire, that materialize post-exposure to really serious natural disasters. You know, one of the researchers I spoke with while reporting, you know, effectively showed that there's, there's a specific deficit in terms of responses to climate trauma. That's all about the ability to ignore distractions. Basically, you get worse at that when you develop the kind of PTSD associated with climate trauma. You're, you're more distractible effectively. And one of the things she showed is that you can basically recover your undistractability. You can, you can regain that loss of function through a series of breathwork protocols,

• 46:08Speaker 08

  through these like mindfulness activities. And it's, it's one example among many, but one of the things that appears to be the case in terms of the, you know, contemporary cognitive neuroscience research on some of these questions is that awareness in its own right, attention as understood neurobiologically, is key to a lot of what's happening here. And if we can get serious at the individual level about maintaining mindful presence, about reminding ourselves of the transience of experience, noticing our reactions to a given moment, and then noticing the next moment, for example, right?

• 46:50Speaker 08

  Moving through these protocols from contemplative traditions that of course have been in practice for thousands of years and often these days are kind of packaged up into, you know, the cute webinar version. If we can leverage any flavor thereof for the purpose of grounding awareness in both the environment and the self, it seems to be the case that that type of interaction with ourselves and with the world is that which unscrambles, for example, the randomness that I suggested earlier occurs in the heat, right? We see that there's this functional connectivity network structure that seems to be recovered under mindfulness. So there's something there.

• 47:33Speaker 08

  I don't think it's a be all, end all, but there is something to be said about awareness. And I think it's also true at the societal level. We cannot ignore the effects in question. Awareness matters if we're going to garner any kind of response in terms of what happens next, in terms of what do we do about any of this? You know, currently, there are a handful of intergovernmental bodies that think really seriously about climate change and health. It's pretty rare for, you know, a big climate policy cost benefit analysis to take something like the recommendations of those organizations into account and indeed inject health considerations into their cost benefit analysis.

• 48:15Speaker 08

  Nobody across the board, health organization, policy shop, whoever it may be, is thinking about anything we've talked about on this call. There's, there's nowhere, even in the climate and health literature, that attempts to, for example, price the coming wave of presenteeism and absenteeism that we might witness in the workplace as a function of temperature increases, right? All of the neurological effects that we've discussed thus far, they're sitting on a shelf. They're sitting in conversations like these, but they are not part of the policymaking infrastructure yet. And I think awareness at the societal level. Has something to do with an integration of

• 48:56Speaker 08

  research that is well understood into the decision-making protocols that actually govern our response to climate change. I really do cling dearly to the notion that this doesn't need to be a story of fear. We can, we can name our responses, identify ourselves as real, as, as agents in this world. That's important. That's something, right? Climate change is really good at stealing agency. I think what the awareness story gives us back is a little bit of control. And for me, being able to understand your responses, being able to understand your actions, not just as some mechanical knee jerk reflex, but indeed infused with agency and akin to

• 49:41Speaker 08

  the world's perceptions, right? Akin to the world experiencing you, all of a sudden, you're, you're part of this reciprocal system. You're not removed from it. You're not just a pawn. You have a part to play and, you know, we got it, we got to cling to something first. I mean, it's, for me, it's that.

• 49:59Speaker 07

  I agree fully. And it's, feels weird to say, but despite the incredibly grim nature of this conversation, I really enjoyed chatting with you today. And I just want to thank you so much for taking the time.

• 50:11Speaker 08

  Thanks, Erin. Thanks for the kind words and for reading and for having me on.

• 50:34Speaker 07

  A big thank you again to Clayton Page Aldern for taking the time to chat with me. Also, a big thank you to my friend Debbie for recommending this book to me. If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to learn more, check out our website, thispodcastwillkillyou.com, where I'll post a link to where you can find The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains, as well as a link to Clayton's website and one to the Neuroclimate Working Group, neuroclimate.org. And don't forget, you can check out our website for all sorts of other cool things, including, but not limited to, transcripts, Quarantini recipes, show notes and references for all of our episodes, links to merch, our bookshop.org affiliate page, our Goodreads list, a firsthand

• 51:18Speaker 07

  account form, and music by Blood Mobile. Speaking of which, thank you to Blood Mobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes. Thank you to Leona Scolacci and Tom Breyfogle for our audio mixing, and thanks to you listeners for listening. I hope you liked this episode and are loving being part of the TPWKY Book Club. A special thank you, as always, to our fantastic patrons. We appreciate your support so very much. Well, until next time, keep washing those hands.

• 52:43Speaker 05

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• 53:19Speaker 10

  Lisa, tell them about our new show.

• 53:22Speaker 11

  We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me.

• 53:25Speaker 10

  I'm Lexi Iwanu. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart.

• 53:30Speaker 11

  And I'm Lisi DiGiulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all.

• 53:39Speaker 10

  Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business.

• 53:44Speaker 11

  Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.