My Climate Change

摘要

Some things just seem too momentous to keep in mind. One is the planet we're living on. We're on the third rock from the sun twenty-four hours a day, but I've only been to one place where that awareness is enforced by nature. Squatting on a floe of eight-foot-thick sea ice at the North Pole, drifting on the 14,300-foot-deep Arctic Ocean hundreds of miles from land, with everything in every direction south and the sun circling the horizon, you absolutely feel you are on a planet. Another momentous thing we hardly ever think about is the thing we think with: the brain. I think about mine now quite a bit, ever since a hot July day in 2011 when my eyes started telling me conflicting stories about the nature of the world as I huffed and strained to keep up with my far fitter son running up a steep trail in the woods near my home.