Dr. Debra Hendrickson works in Reno, Nevada, the fastest-warming city in the United States. Her new book, The Air They Breathe: A Pediatrician on the Frontlines of Climate Change, is a moving account of caring for children who are already experiencing the health impacts of climate disruption. Her written voice balances a pediatrician’s warm, intimate bedside manner with unflinching moral clarity about climate reality.
The Air They Breathe is above all a call to action: “Our children are planning their lives in circumstances no prior generation has seen. Childhood has always been a risky period of life; throughout history, babies and children have met peril, from polio to famine, from cyclones to war. Yet they have never had to face, in quite this way, the potential loss of the future itself.”
Reading The Air They Breathe brought me to tears; it’s painful to bear witness to the myriad ways climate change is stealing the world our children deserve. But as Hendrickson says, “The science of what is happening to our planet and what that means for our children now demands our love.” I was left with a renewed commitment to putting my maternal love into continued climate action. I hope it will inspire others too.
Tell the House of Representatives: Protect Our Children From Extreme Weather
What made you want to focus professionally on climate change and pediatrics?
Medicine was my second career. I was an environmental studies major in college and then went to graduate school in forestry. After my kids were born I went to medical school to become a pediatrician.
The merging of my two careers happened during the Yosemite Rim fire in 2013, the first in a series of catastrophic smoke crises that would strike Reno in the following years because of the mega-fires in California. During that event, a 10-month-old was brought into my clinic wheezing and struggling to breathe. I was listening to her lungs, and she looked up at me with these big brown eyes, and it struck me like a blow to the chest because I knew that the size of this fire was indicative of the world we were creating for children. I felt this sense of guilt and anger that this little baby was suffering the consequences of decisions made by powerful people who would never have to look her in the face. My two worlds came together in that moment.
What’s your current state of mind when it comes to the climate crisis?
I get asked this question a lot, often framed as, “Are you optimistic or pessimistic?” I go back to my experiences working with parents whose children have received serious, even terrible diagnoses. No matter how difficult a situation may seem, parents never give up on their children. Regardless of income, education, background, or how much they’re struggling themselves, they’re always trying to learn and advocate and look for new treatment options. They don’t give up and resign themselves to the idea that there’s no hope for their kids. We don’t think about optimism or pessimism in that situation, we just get in the trenches and do what we need to do.
There’s a real parallel between that and the situation we’re in now. There’s certainly a lot of terrible news, on both the climate and political fronts. Last year was the hottest year ever; this year isn’t looking great either. But there’s also, of course, lots of hopeful news. The Inflation Reduction Act, which is only two years old, unleashed a revolution in clean energy manufacturing in the U.S. China is meeting its emission reduction goals ahead of schedule. The European Union has made a lot of progress.
My hope with the book was that I could tap into that same sense of protectiveness, to wake parents up to the need to fight the oil and gas industry, and to remind people that helplessness and hopelessness and doomerism is a strategy being used by that industry and by petrostates like Russia to try to get us to disengage and give up. We have to recognize that, no matter the circumstances, we must fight. Because we can’t give up. We have a moral responsibility to our kids.
What’s one thing everyone should know about climate change and children’s health?
I want to highlight why climate change is so dangerous for children’s health—they’re not just small adults. Their physiology is quite different. They breathe faster, they have fewer sweat glands, and those glands activate more slowly. They have more surface area compared to their weight, so they can heat up much faster than adults. Their judgment is immature, so they depend on adults to keep them safe. Their organs are still developing and growing. Some organs’ development depends on interaction with the environment: the quality of lung growth, and the size of a child’s lungs, depend on the quality of the air they breathe throughout childhood. The brain also goes through significant development in early life and can be injured by pollution and trauma and all kinds of things that are accelerating because of climate change. Low-income children are more at risk from almost all these problems because they tend to live in hotter, more vulnerable areas.
What do you hope readers will take away from your book?
There’s no good future for our children if we don’t stop carbon pollution. If we stopped tomorrow, modeling shows that the earth’s temperatures would stabilize in 3 to 5 years. If we stay on our current trajectory, we’re heading for catastrophic warming. And that makes all other points moot. It’s as important as any other steps [caregivers are] taking to protect kids—car seats, brushing teeth, going to the pediatrician. There’s this small window to act to prevent the worst, and if we go in the wrong direction in the next few years and squander that window, it’s going to be devastating and irreversible.
Do you have a climate motto or mantra?
When people ask me what they can do, I say : “Do something, no matter how small. Each action tends to beget another.” There’s a conflict within the activist community about whether we should focus on individual action or pushing for systems change, and I don’t think it’s an either-or question.
Tell the House of Representatives: Protect Our Children From Extreme Weather