Health Care IS Climate Care
“People can’t be healthy when the planet is sick.”
Dr. Elaine Blacklock M.D.
AKA Doctor AIR Care
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VAA and The Audacity of Acronyms
The world of medicine is strewn with 3-letter acronyms, and no-where is this more true than in the modern NICU. We have acronyms for everything: RDS, BPD, IVH, SGA, LGA, UVC . . .
WE DON’T HAVE FIVE PLANETS!!
When Europeans first made their way to the “New World”, equipped with weapons and diseases with which to kill off and decimate the indigenous peoples, the vast land . . .
Doctor AIR Care talks to FFF’s Sophia Mathur
It’s Hallowe’en Friday, 2020. Sophia Mathur and friends have been climate striking on Friday afternoons for 2 full years. Doctor AIR Care emerges on the street . . .
Uh oh . . . AC and Blacklock are at it again!
Sustainable health care? Now that’s an OXYMORON if ever there was one.
Desflurane: Banned for Bad Climate Behaviour
Back in June of 2020, I sat under the gazebo in the backyard of Sudbury anesthetist-environmentalist Sanjiv Mathur, swatting at mosquitoes, and admiring his astroturf . . .
Why the Bolands Bike to Work, Even When It “feels like 38C”
One day in early July, during that eight-day ordeal of “feels like 38C”, I watched a lean yet powerful guy whizz up my street on a bike. It was none other than . . .
Overshooting Earth
A Day Worth Pondering
Today is Earth Overshoot Day 2020 (EO Day). EO Day marks the point in the calendar year when humans exceed the planet’s capacity to sustain us. It’s about two weeks late this year . . .
Six Degrees of Climate Health Warnings
In 2007, Mark Lynas published a book called Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. In the book, he described, degree by degree, how things would be on Planet Earth . . .
My Composting Worms Had Babies
My composting worms have birthed cent-uplets! Or maybe mille-uplets?? Well, to be honest I didn’t dig my hands right in and try to count them. All those tiny white squigglers . . .
Off the Grid . . . The Brief Saga of a Wind Turbine
For a few glorious moments, the bright blue, hand-carved blades and heavy turbine of Ken Foster’s latest “windmill” stood poised high in the sky, nearly vertical. Ken was manning the winch . . .
How to Stop Freaking Out and DO Something
I’m trying to get you from APATHY to ACTION! From GUILT to GAME PLANS. From ANGER to ACTS OF BRAVERY. From DESPAIR to DEEDS OF GREATNESS. And look what I’ve achieved already! You invented me . . .
Climate Grief or Climate Action
EGB: Sadness. Anger. Where do you actually go with these feelings? Sadness that things you love, beautiful things, valuable things . . . are disappearing, possibly forever, as the fires burn . . .
Diet for a Healthy Climate
AC: Good Gracious . . . my cognitive resources are altogether underwhelmed. I just consumed Mr. Paul Greenberg’s New Year’s Opinion Piece in the New York Times, called A New Year’s Climate Diet. Have you read it, EGB?
EGB: Well, when you read something, don’t I also? I mean, we’re two parts of a whole aren’t we? And what’s that about cognitive resources? Do you mean bandwidth?
AC: Bandwidth is mere urban slang. And, we could debate . . .
It’s Hallowe’en Friday, 2020. Sophia Mathur and friends have been climate striking on Friday afternoons for 2 full years. Doctor AIR Care emerges on the street . . .