Dr. Debra Hendrickson is a Reno, Nevada, pediatrician who has published a 2024 book entitled, "The Air They Breathe: A Pediatrician on the Frontlines of Climate Change" (Simon and Schuster publishers, ISBN 978-1-5011-9713-0, link here). I first heard about this new book from a Texas Public Radio podcast. I hurried to borrow it from my local library.
Her book provides a unique blend of the science explaining the many widespread, and deeply troubling negative effects on the worlds' children, resulting from fossil fuel pollution and the associated global climate destabilization from greenhouse gas emissions, combined with dozens of stories documenting many intimate details of those effects on specific children and their families. As Dr. Hendrickson reports (p. 4), "The American Academy of Pediatrics has warned about climate threats to children for over a decade; almost 90% of global disease attributable to the crisis is occurring in those under five years old." There are "almost two billion children in the world," she exclaims (p. 83). "They trust us to keep them safe and we are failing them."
She comprehensively reviews the many mechanisms already attacking children, including air pollution (both out-of-doors and indoors), and the litany of climate related and climate-forced disasters now so widely affecting millions of people every year: bomb cyclones, floods, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, straight-line winds, tornados, and wild fires. The book also touches on climate linked threats to local, regional, and global food supplies, already resulting in malnutrition and famine, and forcing thousands of families to seek new homes, as climate-refugees (link here).
Furthermore, Dr. Hendrickson describes the many vectors spreading diseases into new geography as flora and fauna spread into areas with previously inhospitable climates, bringing with them Dengue, Ebola, Lyme, Malaria, Zika, and even more diseases whose names are not yet familiar to North Americans, as side-effects piling onto climate change. Her book includes detailed case study reports of her own experiences with such occurrences already affecting the world's children, describing multiple physical and mental health calamaties, including toxic stress for survivors.
As everyone paying attention is already painfully and disturbingly aware, our planet is already facing increasing numbers of climate related disasters resulting in billion-dollar damages each year (links here, here, and here), while our so called leaders in government and business are generally pretending there is no urgent need to stop and reverse our dependence on fossil fuels and our associated greenhouse gas emissions.
Hendrickson reviews what the world's scientific community has been warning, in increasingly emphatic and conclusive terms in its series of International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports dating from 1990 to the present (link here). She explains (pp. 6, 10):
[O]ur warming world is not just a health and existential threat, it is the greatest moral crisis humanity has ever faced. ... All the children alive today, and all who will ever live, were chosen to bear this burden by the men who ruled the world. ... Because a disease of our own making is unraveling the fabric in which our children live; because our warming of the planet is already harming their physical and mental health. Because we can still save our children from climate change's worst impacts -- but we have less than a decade to change course.
[p. 93] this is a "global crisis we knew was coming." "negligence" is resulting in a more chaotic world, driven to extremes of weather and thought, plagued by violence by nature and man."
[pp. 113, 115] "Today, every child on Earth is in peril. ... Every hour, more [greenhouse gases] accumulate above us, guaranteeing the disasters to come."
[p. 153] "The question is not how much worse climate change has gotten in the past decade, or how many children have been hurt. It's what I and everyone else will do about it in the next."
[p. 154] "It is impossible to overstate the emergency we are in, and how muted the world's response is relative to the threat."
[p. 156] "The faster we eliminate fossil fuels, ... the better our kid's future will be."
[p. 161]: Drawdown. The Parent's Guide to Climate Revolution by Mary DeMocker. "The actions of individuals, public institutions, and corporations are not competitive, they're iterative." "Action breaks us out of despair and inertia. . . . that sense of power and hope can be contagious."
[p. 167] "[F]ighting back isn't just the best way to cope. It's the only way to win."
[p. 168] Because we are "currently on track to shoot past" the goal of 1.5 degrees C, "it portends a terrifying and unacceptable future."
[p. 170] "the New BUildings Institute and the World Resources Institute have produced roadmaps for school districts." https://newbuildings.org/resource/decarbonization-roadmap-guide-for-school-building-decision-makers and https://electricschoolbusinitiative.org.
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