The latest interview with a reader of All Our Yesterdays. If you want to do an interview, or want to nominate someone to be interviewed, let me know via drmarchudson@gmail.com
1. Who are you and what do you “do” around climate change campaigning (can answer both ‘personally’ and professionally
Hi, thanks for asking. I’m an OBGYN and began reading about the climate crisis in 2008 –the year my twins were born. I lived in Southern California from 2010 until 2021 and during that time I saw marked changes in the landscape and hydrology in the area, and very few people talking about it. In 2020 the Bobcat fire raged behind my house and for weeks we were told to be ready to evacuate, the air quality was horrific and we truly couldn’t even walk outside save for essential transport, like going to work or the grocery store. The fire eventually burned 115k acres and it really scared me, physically and mentally. I had been working the majority of my career as a physician on issues around gender equity, and I realized that there was a necessary intersection between women’s and maternal health equity, reproductive justice, and the climate crisis, and decided to focus my efforts in my spare time learning about how temperature affects preterm births, how wildfire affects lung function, how phthalates in plastics affect birth weight, preterm birth, and cancer, and many other consequences to living in a society dependent on fossil fuel, whether as energy or as consumer products, and that both were having profound effects on human health. Another doctor and I started OBGYNs for Sustainable Future focused on assisting the medical field to decarbonize and study the intersection of the climate and fossil fuel crisis and human and maternal health.
2. When and how did you first hear about climate change and when and how did it move from an “ooh, that sounds bad” to “holy fucking SHIT”
Great question, I used to have nightmares when I lived in California, that I would get into the shower and no water would come out. And I had that dream over and over again. I remember in 2006 hearing about climate change and drought on the NPR show Marketplace, but it was far off. The first time I started thinking about in a serious way was about 15 years ago – it was an article about ocean acidification, and I remember thinking that based on the math, the Great Barrier Reef would be nearly dead by the time my kids graduated high school, nor would I spend the jet fuel, CO2, to go see it. And that was a revelation: that things in this world will disappear soon, in our lifetimes, due to our consumptive extractivist lifestyles and our absent understanding of ecology. I’ve been reading more and more since that article, listening, learning. Now I lecture on the topic of climate change and health. The question is: how many people have felt the terror of all that we are poised to lose? I would argue not enough. Not a fraction of enough.
3. What can we learn from the long long history of unsuccessful campaigning and scientific warnings (a theme of All Our Yesterdays). What do campaigners/activists/concerned citizens need to do differently?
Another excellent question. I do think talking to people (friends, neighbors, colleagues) helps. I know I feel reenergized especially when I speak to others that understand the severity of the situation. Call us doomers, call us climate realists, I don’t care what the label is, I care that people understand the science and are willing to speak openly about the implications of the science. To be sure children and young adults may need some protection from the catastrophe unfolding, but adults? Nah. It makes me furious when I see smart people downplay the severity in the name of keeping the public calm. Like we’re children? If civil society is going to break when they understand what is inevitable, then that society wasn’t built to endure, which, I would argue, our society is very fragile and not built to endure. Would you not tell a patient whose MRI shows invasive cancer that she doesn’t have cancer? No, you wouldn’t, that would be paternalistic. I think civil disobedience helps, and I have given hundreds of dollars to Climate Defiance for their work, I think it’s impactful. I think the media could do a much better job, as we saw media coverage of the crisis in the U.S. was down in 2023, the hottest year in 125,000. Make that make sense? We need more stories connecting the world of Dune and that of Earth, what would a world devoid of plants and water mean, and how many people could it support? Spoiler, not many! I think the language of degrowth needs to get louder. People need to be shown that an economy (maybe 1/10000000th of the size) could exist without extraction.
4. What projects/events have you got coming up in the near future that you want to give a shout out to.
I am doing a local talk at a library in April. I’m interviewing an expert on the connection between phthalate exposure and preterm birth, among other ills when we eat, breathe and are constantly ingesting plastic. I’m also working on an editorial, that may become a book, about how essential it is to equate climate justice and reproductive justice. Contraception and education are imperative so that women and girls have the ability to choose if and when they want to have a child in this crisis. People say, “but having a child is an act of hope,” but hope can’t feed you when crops fail due to drought and floods. The patriarchy, a system that has operated for 10,000+ years, cannot continue. We cannot continue to subjugate women and girls to a system that has forced or encouraged them to have children for the church, for the state, for capitalism, for tribal government and systems. Reproductive justice is climate justice. Women and girls’ bodies are not anyone’s to write a personal or societal agenda on. People complaining that society will collapse if women stop having children… who will support the old people? If the system can’t support elders because too much is siphoned off in profits for a tiny minority, then the problem is the system, not women. A universal income would go a long way to supporting the elderly. But we can’t have universal income because then how would Mark Zuckerberg afford a 300 million yacht. The top 1% in the world own 30% of the world’s wealth. That is a system designed to collapse. Not the problem of women and girls to fix for ya’ll. I want to give a shout out to Nandita Bajaj at Population Balance. I’ve been taking a course through Antioch University with her and others and I’ve learned a lot of about capitalism, forced birth, pronatalism, speciesism, ecocide and what it would mean to downsize in order that natural ecosystems can flourish alongside human flourishing.