The Air they Breathe | Open Mind
Posted on July 16, 2025 | 1 Comment
Dr. Debra Hendrikson, M.D., recounts the moment she decided to say it out loud while on the job. Like most good pediatricians, she avoided topics with risky political implications because she knew how valuable it is to have a good relationship with her patients’ parents. But on a day in 2018, in a room with two children on oxygen because of exposure to smoke and ash from western wildfires, after most of the month not being able to see the sun in the sky in Reno, Nevada because of it, after a steady and dramatic increase in exactly this kind of air pollution for more than a decade, when one kid’s father looked out the window and exclaimed “What is happening?” Dr. Hendrikson said the words. “It’s climate change.”
Thank God she did. Thank goodness that the father who asked, at first shocked to hear it, who didn’t want to say it out loud either, let on that he already knew. Thank goodness that the mother who overheard not only agreed, she bitterly mocked the fools and liars who deny reality.
I think of myself as well-informed on the subject of climate change, or at least I did until I read Dr. Hendrikson’s book The Air They Breathe. I had no idea how profoundly it has affected children’s health, in America and around the world. Dr. Hendrikson speaks from experience working as a pediatrician. She sees what her patients are suffering from and she sees the direct causal relationship with climate change.
She points to the dramatic increase in cases and mortality related to some very specific and very revealing conditions — exactly the kind of thing I tend to do. I can graph the number of hospital admissions, the rise in emergency room visits, the increase in mortality, I can even analyze their relationship to climatic conditions. But I have never been the one who tried to save a teenager dying from a severe asthma attack, only to fail. As Dr. Hendrikson says, “It is one thing to cite those statistics. It is another to have it happen in your hands.”
She powerfully proves her thesis, that “The climate crisis is a health crisis, and it is a health crisis, first and foremost, for children.” I strongly urge you all to buy two copies of this book: one to read and share with your friends, another to send to one of your elected representatives. |
