The Weight of Nature

It's hard, at this late date, to write something profound and new about the overarching crisis of our times. But Clayton Aldern has succeeded - this book is a triumph, rigorous in its reporting but also in its thinking and feeling. I learned an awful lot

Bill McKibben

What a book! Profound, revelatory, exquisitely written – The Weight of Nature is an unnerving insight into the effects climate change is having on us, as human beings, right now. This is vital, urgent reading, a lifeline to lead us out of the labyrinth.

Isabella Tree

Clayton Page Aldern’s writing is so engaging, his research so novel, and his inquiry into our brains and bodies so timely and revealing that this is a rare climate change book you’ll actually savor

Alan Weisman, author of THE WORLD WITHOUT US and COUNTDOWN

This important watershed book has powerful immediacy as it explains in a clear, warm voice precisely how climate change is making tiny incremental changes in our brains and bodies. Many believe that human brains and bodies can resist or adapt to a warming world. But we learn here that there are limits. Penetrating, intensely personal, and impossible to put down, this is a book you need to read

Annie Proulx, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

The Weight of Nature is a funny, moving and extraordinarily necessary tour through an area of science that might be more important than any other. It is beautifully researched, fascinating and deeply awe-inspiring: showing how much more connected we are to our physical environment than I could possibly have imagined. I defy anyone not to come away moved, entertained, and changed

Xand van Tulleken

Urgently necessary… A lyrical and scientifically rigorous account of the emotional and physical toll climate change is taking on the human brain

Kirkus Reviews (Starred)

A neuroscientist shows the myriad ways that our warming climate is making us cranky, dopey and sick… Aldern has managed to do something that most books about climate change fail to: cast the problem in a new light, revealing it to be more insidious than it first appeared

Ben Cooke, The Times

Aldern is the rare writer who dares to ask how climate change has already changed us

The New York Times, Book Review

Gripping... completely blew my mind

Heatmap

Elegant, convincingly argued … a calm voice in a world of chaos … impossible to ignore

Philippa Nuttall, New Statesman

Arresting revelations ... this is not another book about climate anxiety

Financial Times

Aldern is an excellent storyteller, drawing on interviews and personal experience, with an elegant prose style… and his background in neuroscience puts him on a strong footing to explore the mechanistic impacts of climate change on brain function and chemistry

George Marshall, TLS

In The Weight of Nature, Clayton Page Aldern comes closer than anyone in a long time to articulating why so many of us feel queasy about climate change: it is altering the landscape but also us... Beautifully written, this heatwave reading will give you the chills

Anjana Ahuja, Financial Times

Compelling.. unexpected and nuanced

British Journal of Psychiatry

While we are so often attuned to an individualistic separateness of self, The Weight of Nature offers a new way of understanding our relationship with the Earth through a grounded notion of planetary empathy

Manon Martini, Resurgence Magazine