Have you ever had a moment that changed your life?
It was the 30th of October 2018, and I was trying to get my kids to bed. I’d finally got them down but I didn’t dare move off the bed as I knew that they’d wake up. So I flicked on my phone to catch up on the news. And I read a newspaper headline that floored me.
It said ‘Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970.’
I genuinely didn’t believe it. That would mean that basically in my lifetime (I was born in 1972), we’d killed 60% of animal life. Surely this was nonsense. People just wouldn’t allow it.
I checked the source. It was completely solid. And I thought, for the first time, that someone should be doing something about this.
Prior to all of this, I hadn’t paid much attention to anything I thought of as environmental or ‘greenie’. And I didn’t suddenly change overnight.
But what I did start doing was reading. I started clicking on articles about biodiversity, but also about climate change, air and plastic pollution. The more I read, there more I began to realise how huge and interconnected these issues were. I recognised the root cause of many of these problems, which is fossil fuel combustion. And somewhere along the way, I stopped simply reading, and started becoming involved in what is clearly the defining fight of the 21st Century. I became the change I wanted to see in the world.
At the same time, I started to see connections between what had become my mission in my spare time, with what I did for a living during the day.
I’m privileged to work as a medical specialist. I diagnose and treat people with dementia; and help people and their families live with these devastating illnesses, which in most cases we can’t yet cure. Usually, we don’t know why a specific person gets dementia; and this is also true for our other big killer, cancer. But over the last couple of decades, huge amounts of evidence have implicated air pollution from fossil fuels as a significant cause of cancer and dementia. Heart disease, emphysema, OP, diabetes, kidney disease, stroke, infertility and birth complications are also at least partly caused by air pollution. We now understand that air pollution from fossil fuel combustion causes as many global deaths each year as cigarette smoking.
Fossil fuels cause a huge amount of human disease and early death through air pollution; and yet that isn’t even their greatest threat to human health. As the primary cause of climate change, they pose an even greater threat to us, a fact recognised by the WHO, AMA, RACP, Lancet, NEJM.
In 2018, I read that we’d destroyed 60% of animal life in my lifetime.
It is 2023. We are in a climate emergency and this decade will determine the outcome of that emergency. The species we’re now fighting for is our own.
What moment or event might cause you to step up?