Kids can’t be healthy on a sick planet
Originally published in The Sudbury Star on Nov. 13, 2021
On a hot July day in the summer of 2015, an older pediatrician was out on the street chatting with a couple of neighbours. During a lull in the conversation, she was heard to say: “I’m really worried about climate change, but I don’t know what I could do that would make a difference.” She sounded pretty lame, especially to herself.
As luck would have it, one of her neighbours was the National Director of Citizen’s Climate Lobby Canada. So obviously Blacklock wasn’t allowed to get away with her verbal flailing. To her credit, she got busy, read a great many books, started writing letters to the editor, and became a lobbyist for the very system of greenhouse gas pollution pricing now in place across Canada.
As mentioned, Blacklock was indeed getting older. Silver threads amongst the gold, as the (very) old song goes. She’d finished her pediatric training in 1989, before most current medical students were born. After a two-year stint in West Africa, she’d returned to Canada and done her best to serve, at the hospital and the office, for close to thirty years. And as those years flew by, Blacklock found herself thinking some troubling thoughts. In this regard she was not unique. It’s a common theme for older health professionals, who’ve worked long hours, year after year, doing their very best for whatever patient is before them. They start to recognize anew something they may (or may not) have been taught in medical school: Access to a good health care system is important, but for the most part what really keeps people healthy are the so-called social determinants of health: access to clean air and water, healthy food, green spaces, housing, and the internet; educational and vocational opportunities; political stability and safety; stable family and social networks; vaccination and other public health measures . . . the list goes on and on.
But as Blacklock studied, and listened, and even started writing a book, she found herself coming face to face with an even deeper reality: all those social determinants of health, and indeed our health care systems themselves, depend upon the health of the planet. And all the babies and kids and teens and families she’d cared for over the years (not to mention her own offspring) were heading out to live their lives on a planet that’s increasingly unhealthy. A planet that’s in fact seriously ill. A planet in the midst of multiple man-made crises: air pollution, deforestation, and a changing climate. Drastic destruction of ecosystems. A great dying off of plant, animal, and insect species. Oceans chock-a-block full of plastic and dead zones. Bleaching coral reefs. Way too much phosphate, nitrogen, and carbon in all the wrong places. And a rapidly rising population of humans who are consuming resources and excreting garbage at levels well beyond the support capacities of the planet.
In the face of these realities, Blacklock contemplated how best to spend her latter years, and came to the conclusion that she would become a “chronically retiring” pediatrician, devoting the majority of her time to fighting for the most fundamental determinant of health: a healthy, thriving planet. Some days, it’s an overwhelming task. A mere pediatrician has only so much power and influence. COPs come and go. Change is slow and incremental. But of this Blacklock remains certain: there’s no better way to care for her patients (and her own children) than to fight for their health on Planet Earth. Because ultimately, no kid will be healthy on a sick planet.