“I don’t seek to leave you in the foetal position,” writes Clayton Page Aldern, a neuroscientist turned environmental journalist. The Weight of Nature, his elegant, convincingly argued book about how climate change is altering our minds, bodies and brains, didn’t make me want to curl up silently; it made me want to shout, to rouse people from their slumber. Aldern asks whether we are awake. The answer for most of us is no. Too many people, especially politicians, seem unable or unwilling to comprehend the dangers posed by a warming world and prefer to carry on, head in the sand, with business and life as usual. Aldern shows us that the world we knew has gone. The choice he offers us is to continue to make things worse, or to confront the crisis and work together to reduce harm and become more resilient.
The book opens in California with Dezaraye Bagalayos, mother to a six-year-old daughter, watching in sufferance as the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which once provided water for “the breadbasket of the world”, dries up. “My daughter has no future,” says Bagalayos. “Our days on this planet are numbered, I don’t think how we will all die will be pleasant, and nothing and no one is moving fast enough to stop it.” The delta is drying up because of the vast amounts of water required for the industrial quantities of nuts, fruits and vegetables grown in the valley and because climate change means less rain and higher temperatures. In response, farmers are drilling down “as deep as two thirds of a mile – to tap Joaquin’s aquifers”.
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