This Week: Meet Clayton Aldern and Abby Reyes
This week, we are excited to introduce you to two Mesa Refuge alums changing the critical local and national conversations about climate change and resilience. Clayton Aldern’s new book, The Weight of Nature: How A Changing Climate Changes Our Brains, was just featured on the cover of last week’s New York Times Book Review! Congratulations, Clay!
Will you help us to support courageous writers-on-the-edge like Clay and Abby today?
Clayton Aldern, 2022 Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow
“I’m interested in identifying the throughlines woven through disparate fields of research. ‘The edge,’ for me, is where these fields meet. My most recent writing project—of which I completed a portion at Mesa Refuge—concerns the relationships between climate change and neuroscience; and what better place to explore this edge than an institution physically situated in and constituted as a place where ideas collide?”
Clay is a writer and Oxford-trained neuroscientist interested in science and society. His writing has been published by The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Economist, Scientific American, Logic, Grist, Sierra Magazine, Geographical, Crosscut, UN Dispatch, and others. At the Mesa Refuge, he worked on The Weight of Nature, How A Changing Climate Changes Our Brains about the effects of climate change and environmental degradation on neurochemistry, behavior, decision-making, and mental and emotional health. Find out more on his website.
Abby Reyes, 2018 Jeanette Pontacq Investigative Journalism Fellow
“Through the story of a murder, an oil company’s role, and a global community’s response, Truth Demands charts my navigation through the waters of grief and the churn of oil wars to the sure footing of community resistance and resilience. As a recognized victim in Case 001 of Colombia’s post-civil war truth and reconciliation process, I bring the reader along in my demand for truth before the tribunal while awakening our collective awareness of what the truth demands of all of us in this era of ecological collapse and social transformation. I wrote at the edge of the restored wetlands of Tomales Bay. Studying the intertidal zone from atop the mesa, I could never tell whether to call it water or land. Like grief, the terrain was in constant flux.”
Abby Reyes is a human rights and environmental lawyer. A graduate of Stanford and Berkeley Law, Abby co-chaired the EarthRights board and is an advisor to the National Association of Climate Resilience Planners. She has a TEDx talk on “How to Come Home.” Learn more about Abby’s work on her LinkedIn page.
Will you help us to support courageous writers-on-the-edge like Clay and Abby today?
