Climate Change and Health

NOTE: At the time I drew these pictures a year ago, to accompany a Resolution presented to the Washington Academy of Family Physicians House of Delegates, the focus was on climate change and the family physician. The lessons apply to us all--and we are, or can be, healers, in the broadest sense.

Hopefully the pictures mostly speak for themselves. A few points of clarification and intent:

First, on the “less-busy” side: On a finite planet, any species must eventually reach equilibrium with its environment. In a traditional graph it’s difficult to appreciate that this holds true for humans. To capture our growth in the last 200 years from 1 billion to 7 billion, everything prior to 1800 looks pretty flat. Yet it’s anything but. As the log-log scale shows, we’ve had one series of exponential leaps after another, and every time the curve gets close to flattening, a new “advance” results in another order-of-magnitude population growth. The great hazard is that our last two (or more) leaps have likely been unsustainable. Oil provides both the energy, through mechanized harvesting, as well as literally the substance, through petro-fertilizers, of our food growing. And biotechnology, while it has delayed the crashes predicted by Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 “The Population Bomb”, has resulted in further dramatic growth while increasing our reliance on mono-crops, which could prove susceptible to massive failures of disease, drought, or heat. The larger question is, even if we could produce vastly more food, would this result in improved quality of life, or even less worldwide hunger? To date it hasn’t.

The bottom of the page shows atmospheric CO2 in the last several hundred thousand years. Though we don’t have one continuous, unbroken record dating back to Earth’s formation, we do have, from ice cores looking at different carbon and oxygen isotopes, excellent data. What this graph can’t show, because of scale, is a comparison to the last known major warming period post-dinosaur extinction (65M years ago). But we know a lot about this period, called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM, which occurred 55M years ago. At that time, massive release of carbon dioxide led to a period of global warming. Geologists have often used the PETM as the best recent analogy to today’s warming and CO2 levels. It has been offered in the lay press as a reassuring comparison, because while certain ocean species suffered extinction rates of at least 50%, most land animals did well. However, as described in geologist Robert Hazen’s 2013 book “The Story of Earth”, recent ice-core evidence has shaken scientists by revealing that The PETM’s 5 degree Celsius warming occurred over a time period of 10,000 to 20,000 years, and the CO2 release was also slow. Today’s rise in CO2 levels is at least 10x as fast, and the projected temperature increase—currently we are on track for 5-6C by 2100, the non-binding Paris agreement doing nothing concrete to slow this—is thus occurring at a rate 100 to 200x as fast.

This brings us to the “busy” side and the heart of the matter starting with Wile E. Coyote in the upper left: we are stepping off a cliff. What that cliff represents is a huge number of positive feedback loops, processes we’re setting in motion that will likely continue even if all emissions stopped tomorrow. This in combination with our population growth makes our current history frighteningly akin, as journalist Elizabeth Kolbert argues in “The Sixth Extinction”, to the K-T boundary (dinosaurs) or one of Earth’s other 5 mass extinctions. I call your attention to three of those: in the far upper right, as the permafrost melts, it will release huge sinks of methane, which is 20 to 80 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat. Near the bottom left, as the ocean acidifies, we’re facing the loss of the very phytoplankton that both absorb CO2 and provide half of our breathable oxygen. And back to the upper right: Severe weather, such as multi-year droughts that Syria and other places are already in the midst of, are causing or exacerbating civil unrest while simultaneously stripping the resultant climate refugees of land to which they might otherwise relocate.

Thus in the center of the page: We are, already, in a crisis of the health of the public. Here and abroad the entire public sector is being slashed and/or privatized even as the wealth of the very very richest increases. This phenomenon is well-described by Naomi Klein in “The Shock Doctrine” (one example being New Orleans during and since Hurricane Katrina), and in her latest book, “This Changes Everything” she makes the compelling case that climate change could push public infrastructure past its breaking point.

And finally, the lower right, the family doctor! Why the family doctor? Because no one is talking about this. Because we give voice to our most vulnerable patients and communities. Because we have an opportunity to build something better. It would be easy to say, “If the door to 2 degrees C closes next year, does it really matter what we do?” Yet we really do have a unique chance to both slow down emissions and, in the process, mitigate the effects of climate change by building a more just, equitable, and sustainable society.

For a moment, and it is likely a brief moment, there is more than enough wealth in the world to bring about enormous good. The challenge is that wealth is concentrated, as per the extreme lower right corner, in the hands of a very very few individuals. Over a decade ago a study found that the world’s 3 richest men controlled assets greater than the world poorest 48 countries. The statistics have only worsened since then. In America today top CEOs make more in a year than their employees could make in 350 years, or 7 generations each working 50 years. Nearly everyone in the world would benefit in the short- and long-term by investing some of this wealth in the strategies proven to increase world peace and stability, namely, improving the educational status, economic status, and reproductive rights of women and children. And even the super-rich would benefit from this approach in the long-term, because no ultimately no one wins, if we all lose a livable planet.

This, I believe, is what we must stand up for. If not us, who, if not now, when?

42

For anyone who has read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series: I have arrived at the answer.

For anyone who hasn’t: The answer (only, of course, the answer to life, the universe, and everything) is 42.

The question, of course, is what is the question?

Recently I’ve started my second attempt at reading Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, this time as an audiobook that I can digest while working out or driving. LL had suggested I read it a while ago. Maybe a year or more ago. To my credit, I did start. It’s just that I don’t actually get far with reading books these days, unless it’s Moomin, Mymble and Little My, or perhaps Madeline, or Monster Trucks—our 2-year-old’s current favorite, featuring trucks that are actually monsters (I’m embarrassed to admit it’s actually growing on me). So right before a recent trip to Seattle I purchased the recorded version of Daring Greatly and started listening, again, as it were.

The truth is, I wasn’t quite ready to hear what I was reading, the first time around. I thought that I really “didn’t do shame.” I feel more ready now. The ready-ness journey has not been an easy one, and it is very much a journey that is ongoing, but I will say that it received a bolt and a jolt, a bump and a thump (to borrow from another favorite, the Meg and Mog series) from last fall’s election. Daring Greatly, for those of you who haven’t wandered into Brené Brown territory, is about shame, vulnerability, and the excruciating, exquisite transformation that happens when we “show up and let ourselves be seen.” It is not that I suffered from a terrible back-log of shame that needed to be worked through. It was and is more that I’ve become more aware of the small moments when I’m either turning towards life, as painful and awkward as it can be, or turning away. And I’m trying to turn towards.

So I’ve finally posted the essay I wrote, well, about a year ago. See my last posting prior to this. At the time I wrote it I knew it was premature. I knew that were I to post it at that time…well, it just didn’t seem right. It was “laying it all out there,” but I hadn’t yet put in any of the real work of relationship-building that I recognized I needed to do. Now, I think, I have embarked on that path. I am doing my best to put in the time and effort. It is exhausting, at times terrifying, and so, so liberating. I am also coming to grips with a basic truth that I already knew years and years ago; in fact I wrote and illustrated my own children’s book on the subject. The opposite of scarcity is not abundance. The opposite of scarcity is enough.

What does any of this have to do with the recent election and with the number 42? And, what is the question?

For me it is this:
We live on a dying planet, by which I mean that we are in the midst of the greatest life extinction event since the K-T (end of dinosaurs) boundary. We are living under a fascist regime that all of us bear some responsibility for allowing to happen, and all of us bear some responsibility for dismantling. Am I willing to speak up about this?

I am but one small scared white privileged straight male 42-year-old homo sapiens. Only through collective action will any of the above (regarding the planet) change. Am I willing to, not from a place of guilt, or despair, but from a place of love, hope, and possibility, reach out to those not like me, to make the world a better place?

Of the qualities I listed above (regarding myself), there is only one that I can change.
There is only one I can let go of.

Am I willing to let go of my fear?

Yes.

Why I’ve always hated the term “At a Crossroads”

**NOTE: I ORIGINALLY WROTE THIS IN MARCH 2016. IT'S TAKEN ME A YEAR TO PUBLISH IT.**
-NJH, APRIL 2017

When I was a kid growing up, my family didn’t own a television. But once a year we would make the epic drive from Halfway, OR, to Toppenish, WA, where we’d stay with family friends, go to the State Fair up in Yakima, and, most significantly, wake up at the crack of dawn to watch all the Saturday morning cartoons we could stomach. So while I have no idea what people are talking about when they mention past (or current—I’ve never owned a TV) shows, I at least have a basic cultural reference point when it comes to, say, Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner.

One iconic image has been replaying itself over and over in my head of late: that combined suspension of disbelief, and gravity, where Wiley has run off the edge of a cliff but not yet accepted the fact of his fall.

“Hate” is a strong word (see “Cars”, 8/31/13). So I’ll just say I’ve always found the term “at a crossroads” woefully inadequate to describe situations such as less than half of Earth’s current species surviving into the 22nd century, where we humans are driving this cataclysm. The reversal needed to give our planet better odds is just not captured by the image of a bucolic

footpath on which stands a culturally neutral forest critter—a squirrel comes to mind—calming choosing between the left and right arrows hand-painted on a quaint wooden sign. The action needed is not a leisurely choice between two paths both rooted on solid ground. The action needed is an emergency pair of (solar-powered, of course) rocket thrusters to be turned on full throttle in reverse, in hopes of crashing backwards into the side of the cliff rather than continuing to plummet into thin air.

I’ve long favored (and recently employed) the image of Wile E. Coyote to describe humanity’s race through the next 50-100 years. I never imagined that such a picture would describe the state of my own future as a husband and a father.

As a spouse and a dad right now I’m in that very thin air. I’m trying to activate my emergency rocket boosters and catch the edge of the cliff instead of plummeting to the rocks far below.

Right now I’m writing this blog on a scrap of paper. I’m sitting in my parked car listening to a marimba CD for the 11th time straight through. In the back seat my 3-year-old son is finally starting to stir, having slept the last 30 minutes here in the parking lot of our hotel near Stanley Park. The hour before that he passed out and slept for a fossil-fuel-consuming driving tour of Vancouver, BC, that eventually, and thankfully, included 30 minutes parked in a quiet residential neighborhood on the north side of the Lion’s Gate Bridge. Prior to that, the epic, screaming, kicking meltdown in the Japanese restaurant, and before that, last night’s head-turning, child-protective-services-call-eliciting (had anyone had a conscience), absolute meltdown in Stanley Park itself. A couple days before that, my own loud, cursing meltdown on a public street in Victoria. My frustration had been in part at having waited half an hour in the cold for a bus that came only minutes after we’d abandoned the bus stop. It was part at being back in a walking orthotic boot as another chapter in a saga of chronic foot injuries. And it was in no small part at the dawning recognition that I am not being the parent nor the person I aspire to be.

It’s been quite the Canadian vacation.

On our ferry ride up from Port Angeles, we found ourselves engaged in a warm exchange with two men. Amusingly, I mistook them for father and son. The “son”, it turned out, was working to put up signs advising motorists of the planetary health effects of our fuel emissions, akin to how cigarette packages carry a human health warning label. The “dad”—they were, in fact, travelling together—was working at similar if less-direct action at Victoria’s Environmental Law Center.

He had written a book, he told us, that at one time was a Canadian best-seller, “Becoming the Kind Father.”

The universe works in funny ways. Sometimes clues are subtle and other times (as when, for example, one chooses to ignore the subtle ones) they are more direct. Here we were, journeying through Victoria on our way to Vancouver to see Naomi Klein speak on climate change and capitalism, and we run into a man offering a possible path to better parenthood. At the time I thought, “that sounds kind of interesting.” Now, several collapses of serenity later, I am feeling more and more that I, like Wile E. Coyote, am not at a crossroads. I’m about to crash and burn.