“This is a crime against children. It's really the greatest crime ever committed.”
Debra Hendrickson, M.D. is a pediatrician in the fastest warming city in the United States, Reno. She has written a book detailing the impact of climate change on children’s health, called The Air They Breathe, a Pediatrician on the front lines of climate change, in which she outlines the crime she believes has been committed against children.
“A group of powerful people, 50 years ago and multiple times since, decided for everyone else on earth, for billions of people, born and unborn, that they were going to change the earth, so that they could profit in the short term,” Hendrickson said. “I think once parents really absorb that this is a daily and ongoing crime against their kids’ health now and the future of everyone forever, they'll realize there's this real urgency to act right now.”
Hendrickson says the damage caused to children’s health caused by climate change-driven wildfires, hurricanes, and heat waves is pervasive. It’s physiological, emotional, and developmental.
“Children aren’t just small adults,” Hendrickson said. “Their organs are still developing and growing. In fact, some organs' development depends on interaction with the environment. The lungs and the brain develop through interaction with the air they breathe and the environment around them.”
Prenatal exposure to particulate pollution created by wildfires and fossil fuel plants has been linked to childhood cancers, hypertension, diabetes, and neurodevelopmental disorders like autism and ADHD.
The threat of exposure doesn’t dissipate after birth, according to Hendrickson.
“They tend to develop smaller, stiffer lungs, so they have reduced lung capacity, and that can have lifelong implications for their lifespan, for their health, for their job prospects,” Hendrickson said.
Extreme weather like broiling heatwaves and lethal hurricanes present other risks, from physical injury and death to toxic stress.
“The financial and emotional impacts of something like this can reverberate through their lives for years, and it can become what's known as an adverse childhood event that really changes the trajectory of a child's life,” Hendrickson added.
Hendrickson’s book also details what we, as adults, can do to improve the future our children's fate. She wants people to know it's not hopeless.
“The modeling has shown that if we stopped carbon emissions today, the world would stop warming in three to five years,” she said. “We actually have a chance to steer the Titanic away from the iceberg by doing something really quickly and really dramatic.”
In this episode of "Petrie Dish" Hendrickson shares with Bonnie Petrie a series of suggestions for steps we can take, right now, to begin steering the Titanic away from the iceberg.
Hendrickson also recommended a book series for children who have or are experiencing traumatic events, from hurricanes to the pandemic to displacement. The Trinka and Sam Disaster Series is written by Chandra Ghosh Ippen, Ph.D..
