
Healthcare workers can play a vital role in battling climate change.
That’s the view of Bill McKibben, the internationally known climate change advocate who will be the keynote speaker at Climate Change & Health 2022: A Roadmap for Grassroots Advocacy on April 9.
Health practitioners are important voices in the fight, he says, as they already see in their patients many of the health consequences – such as nutrition and food security; food, water, and vector-borne diseases; and mental health – caused or exacerbated by global warming.
“We need everyone joining in this fight, and that includes healthcare professionals, to take on the powers that be: the fossil fuel industry, the banks that support them, and the politicians that enable them,” he says. “People need to recognize that we're in an emergency, that time is not on our side, and that we have to act extraordinarily fast to flatten the carbon curve. That’s why the MGH Institute’s event is important because it’s a great example of bringing people together to learn about how to deal with this crisis.”
Co-sponsored by the MGH Institute of Health Professions’ Center for Climate Change, Climate Justice, and Health and the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for the Environment and Health, the virtual symposium also will feature speakers, U.S. Senator Ed Markey (D-MA), Congresswomen Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Lauren Underwood (D-IL), and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. The symposium will include ways attendees can make a difference in their communities and workplace.
McKibben, a pioneer in the fight against global warming, first gained prominence in 1989 with his pioneering book, The End of Nature, which was published in 24 different languages. Since then, he has traveled the world organizing and advocating for needed policy changes to reduce the dangerous effects of global warming. For McKibben, that work has never been more urgent and is a key factor for why he is the keynote speaker at the virtual symposium.
“I think public health is one of the most important ways to talk about climate change,” says McKibben. “In the last year, we have received reliable numbers on the danger that fossil fuel combustion poses to humans even without climate change—roughly 9 million deaths a year just from breathing the particulates it produces. When you then consider the existential health challenges this poses, it’s not hard to recognize that human health is at the center of this issue.”
The symposium’s subtitle, “A Roadmap for Grassroots Advocacy,” is another reason McKibben was drawn to being part of the event. His nonprofit, 350.org that he launched in 2007 with a group of Middlebury College students (where he is also the Schumann Distinguished Scholar of Environmental Studies), has become one of the world’s leading organizers of large-scale pro-tests and global events around Climate Change. In 2009 he and 350.org organized 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries. The following year, they convened more than 7,000 events in 188 countries, including the Global Climate Strike, the Keystone Pipeline protests, and the People’s Climate March, to name but a few.
McKibben says activism is more important than ever. “We have the tools now to combat global warming—solar power, wind power, and batteries—and they are affordable. But a toxic combination of vested interest and inertia is slowing down our adoption of them. Activists need to be pushing hard to overcome that inertia.”
A prolific writer who has published a dozen books and appeared in numerous major newspapers and magazines, McKibben has recently started a writing a Substack blog “The Crucial Years,” the title of which he says speaks to the urgency the world faces. “The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change puts the issue in stark terms: We've got a short window left to make big change if we want to avoid the worst,” he says. “That means between now and 2030, we need to bring change, because past a certain temperature, the system begins to heat itself.”
That sense of urgency inspired him to recently create another new activist movement called Third Act, which focuses on organizing people over the age of 60. “I’m in that demographic, and let’s face it, there are a lot of us,” he says. “We vote in huge numbers, and, fairly or not, most of the money ended up in our bank accounts. So, either we'll be a block to progress, or a force for change. I hope Third Act can help achieve the latter.”