Climate revelations and reminders — a round-up of environment books

What is climate change doing to our brains? What is the future of clean energy or climate policy? How did we let the high seas become a free-for-all? And how is our world being shaped by animal poo? All these questions are tackled in a new batch of environmental books.

Arresting revelations pepper The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes our Minds, Brains and Bodies (Allen Lane, £25) by the neuroscientist and environmental journalist Clayton Page Aldern. Don’t be put off by the title: this is not another book about climate anxiety. Rather, it addresses what Aldern calls the “jarring paradigm shift” of an environment that’s begun to affect our behaviour in largely unreported ways.

Immigration judges are more likely to reject asylum applications on hotter days. When the mercury rises, the chances of a prisoner’s parole application succeeding sinks. And some drugs that act on the brain don’t work as well in high temperatures. Perhaps most startling of all, children who were still in the womb during an extreme weather event face a much higher risk of suffering psychiatric conditions. “Girls who experienced [2012’s Superstorm] Sandy in utero saw a 20-fold increase in anxiety and a 30-fold increase in depression,” Aldern writes. “Boys saw a 60-fold increased risk of ADHD.” 

It’s not hard to see why voters worldwide want climate action. But it’s difficult when our political systems aren’t wired to deal with the problem, writes Thomas Hale, a professor of public policy at Oxford university, in Long Problems: Climate Change and the Challenge of Governing Across Time (Princeton University Press, $29.95/£25.00).

The book is likely to appeal more to academics than general readers, but offers a thoughtful list of reforms that deserve a wider hearing. They include creating official bodies that can set carbon prices in the same way that monetary supply is fixed by central banks. Or creating “transition councils” in hard-to-decarbonise sectors such as aviation and steel. Or expanding citizen assemblies into permanent “climate assemblies” with what he describes as “real decision-making power”.

Those concepts may sound radical but, not so long ago, so did the idea that plug-in electric vehicles would account for more than 90 per cent of Norway’s car sales, or that Sweden’s car market would be more than 60 per cent electric. Yet, as the British clean energy expert Chris Goodall writes in Possible: Ways to Net Zero (Profile Books, £10.99), all this has happened.

In some ways that was the easy bit, as Goodall has argued with admirable clarity in earlier books. This time, he is looking at the tougher challenge of decarbonising trucks, flights, shipping, cement and steel — sectors that are harder to electrify. Goodall sets out the many hurdles that need to be overcome, but ultimately concludes that solutions will be found in a world where technological progress is coming faster than widely realised.

Readers who want to know more about why the shift to green electricity is taking longer than it should are advised to read a book recently reviewed in the FT, The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet by Brett Christophers (Verso, £22). It makes a compelling case that renewables may be getting cheaper than fossil fuels, but they’re still not profitable enough.

In the natural world, meanwhile, the science journalist Olive Heffernan offers a disturbing new take on marine matters in The High Seas: Ambition, Power and Greed on the Unclaimed Ocean (Profile Books, £22). She is concerned with the waters beyond national borders that make up most of the world’s oceans.

In theory, the area is subject to a mix of regulatory codes and bodies overseeing fishing, shipping and mining. In practice, however, lax enforcement and apathy mean the high seas are what Heffernan calls “the wild west, a blue frontier”, where “iceberg cowboys” harvest pristine ice for luxury water, and would-be geoengineers dump tons of iron sulphate to create carbon-capturing plankton — and carbon credits, equal to a tonne of CO₂, that can be sold to companies to compensate for their emissions.

Biologist Joe Roman reveals more hidden aspects of nature in his entertaining book Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World (Profile Books, £18.99). Few of us realise that when we lie on a white sand beach in a place like Hawaii, we are stretching out on the excretions of coral-munching parrot fish. Few of us may wish to. But Roman shows the fish and their formidable jaws are prodigious beach-builders, whose digestive processes end up creating four out of five grains of sand on many tropical beaches.

They are part of an animal kingdom that scientists once regarded as bit players to plants and microbes on the planetary stage. That’s started to change, as researchers have come to understand the vital role that everything from seabirds to cicadas and spiders has in sustaining the natural environment.

Roman’s book is a good counterpoint to the forbidding revelations of climate threats other authors are revealing, not least because it is a reminder that as temperatures rise, ours is not the only species facing serious trouble.

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