There’s a thing in movie franchises called a crossover, where a character from one franchise appears in another. You know the sort of thing: Alien vs. Predator; Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The entire and seemingly interminable Marvel Cinematic Universe series, the total runtime of which is now officially longer than some small wars.
For studios, the financial appeal is pretty obvious. Each character has its devoted fanbase; if you put two characters in one movie, you can get both of them along to the cinema at once. And because the draw is the characters, not the quality of the movie itself, you can skimp on a decent script or convincing effects.
I was thinking about this as I read The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Minds, Brains and Bodies, by Clayton Page Aldern. At the risk of sounding cynical, it struck me as a cinematic crossover event. What are people worried about? Climate change. What else are people worried about? Modern life and mental health! What if we got someone to write a book about… how climate change is damaging our mental health? Then we’d get the climate worriers and the mental healthers buying the same book!
Aldern is not the first person to think of this, and to be fair, climate anxiety is a real problem. Every few weeks a newspaper will run an article by someone saying they won’t have children out of fear that the world won’t be fit to live in, and a global 2021 survey found that more than half of the 10,000 young people surveyed agreed with the phrase “humanity is doomed”. For what it’s worth, I think they’re entirely wrong about that — climate change will have a lot of negative effects on the world, and it’s reasonable to be worried about it, but it’s not going to kill everyone.
On the whole, though, he wants to say something both more subtle and more ambitious than “people are worried about the future”. He wants to say that climate change itself is damaging our brains. He wants to say it’s doing this in obvious ways — we get grumpier and stupider when it’s hot — and in more insidious ones, with the spread of unpleasant diseases and neurotoxins, and, most poignantly, by causing us grief and displacement and loss of identity and all these things which then have various impacts on our brain.
He does this with the weight of academic authority behind him: he is a “neuroscientist turned environmental journalist”, according to the blurb. (Although he does only have a master’s degree in neuroscience. I did a philosophy MA in 2005 but I would feel a bit of a fraud calling myself a “philosopher”.) This makes the book’s flaws all the more baffling, until you remember that it’s a crossover event.
There’s a certain kind of pop-science book that relies on a particular format: story, study, lesson. Christopher Chabris, a psychologist, first noted it in the work of the disgraced science writer Jonah Lehrer. But it’s a staple — you’ll notice it in Malcolm Gladwell books, for instance. You tell some moving, heartwarming or inspiring story; you recount the results of some study which apparently explains what’s going on in people’s brains in those situations; and then you draw them together to give the reader some pat little take-home message.
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