Uncanny Landscapes is the beginning of a sprawling atlas that investigates the often overlooked weird and unsettling emergent properties of the climate crisis. Unlike an actual atlas, this one isn’t well-defined. There are no landmarks or fixed points. Its edges are blurred and its unmarked regions still warn: “Here be dragons.”

Each chapter details the strange oddities produced by the climate crisis. There’s the giant LED screens China has installed in smog-choked cities to televise the invisible sunrise. There’s Dubai, a city that defies the laws of the desert by using so much energy as to have indoor ski mountains and refrigerated sand. And the Arctic, an ever-shifting mythical landscape where ice melts so rapidly that it's changing Earth's gravity and, by extension, time as we know it.

In 1970, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori put forward the idea of the “uncanny valley,” that our affinity for robots increases the more human they look—but only until a certain point. There’s a threshold a few steps before perfectly life-like where our affinity plummets into revulsion. Robots that are nearly human-passing but not quite enough can trigger a severe repulsion.

There’s an uncanny valley for landscapes and we’re tumbling downhill towards it. As climate change transforms Earth's environment a degree or two from the familiar, strange properties emerge: melted palm trees from heat, ghost towns revealed by drying rivers, and ancient diseases revived from thawing permafrost.

Determining how we feel about the climate crisis is a privilege. Those fleeing wildfires in Hawaii or Tuvaluans losing ground to sea level rise don’t have that option. But for the rest of us living in landscapes on the cusp of uncanny change, our bafflement is concerning. If fear leads to inaction—which many studies suggest it does—then it is critical we don’t let our affinity for these changing landscapes plummet. There’s no hope at the bottom of the valley, only terror. We won’t protect what we won’t love. And it is critical, beyond any measure, to love our world now more than we have ever before. That love is unfortunately conditional. We’re taught to revere Yosemite’s open meadows and revile open-pit mines. But the list of Yosemites is dwindling while our hunger for resources deepens.

Our primordial fear of that which looks a degree off from the familiar could be our downfall. What will happen when we’re forced to visit indoor beaches because the summers are too warm, when every blade of grass is digitized and there’s a greater volume of ice in the cubes of Las Vegas cocktails than in the planet’s glaciers? Will we adopt this strange new world as “our new nature,” or lament what we’ve lost? Will we stay in our air conditioned and filtered homes, eyes glued to VR, or step into the dampened sunshine and inhale deeply the acrid smoke?

Every few weeks I make a strange sort of pilgrimage to an uncanny landscape. I go because, despite my unease around these distorted landscapes, I’m choosing not to see the silver lining in the clouds but the rainbow in the oil slick. I’d like to help others change their frame of mind too—I believe it’s necessary. This act of learning to love these new strange lands is not easy but necessary. I think they can be beautiful. Don’t you do too?