Month: February 2024

Psychological scientists incorporate climate into their studies

When a researcher or student applies for money to conduct research, they have to convince the funders not only that their idea is a good one, but that they are the person who should be doing that research. Funders look at a lot of things including the impact of the research, the way the knowledge will be shared, the time it will take to complete, and the return on their investment (value for money).

In the Prime Family Lab at York University, lab director Dr. Heather Prime is discussing the future with her student Alex Markwell. Because of how they apply for and receive their funding, their research projects must be closely tied to the lab itself – in their case, that is the study of family dynamics. How parents and siblings influence children from birth to adolescence, or how major or minor external events affect families. The lab launched in 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic became a major external event that upended family dynamics across Canada and around the world.

Students come to a lab because of the expertise that the research program and supervisor bring to that lab. This is what drew Alex to the Prime Family Lab. Her area of interest is child development within a family systems framework and this is the lens through which she looks at potential projects. She has a keen interest in acting on climate change, but this was not something that was part of the discussion before her arrival. Only through conversations with her new lab director did they discover that this was a shared passion. Heather says,

“Alex brought up a year or two ago that the way we study the pandemic is really transferrable to the way we might study climate change.”

So they started thinking about ways they could integrate climate change into their established research program. As Alex thinks ahead to her Ph.D., which she will be starting in September, she has written a proposal for a scholarship focused on the pathways linking climate change to child and family well-being. One aspect of this proposal is the creation of a theoretical model from a family system perspective.

“Because climate change is going to be more and more relevant to more and more people, you need a map – which sounds annoying because it’s theoretical, but it can create a framework of ‘here’s what we think is going to happen based on everything we already know’. That takes a lot of work – you’re scouring the literature, bringing together a number of theories, and then creating this ‘map’.”

Specifically, Alex is talking about looking at how climate changes and climate change-related events may affect children’s mental health through disruptions to family functioning. She’s thinking that would be similar to the COVID family-disruption model that Heather published, about how the pandemic’s social and economic disruptions trickle down into families and affect their dynamics.

They can start looking at feasible interventions – something psychoeducational that could teach parents and caregivers how to talk to their children about climate change. Or maybe the social and economic ripple effects of climate change impacting family relationships where children may suffer, given that kids are so dependent on their relationship with their parents. First though, they must define the parameters of their study.

Are we talking about families who have experienced a major climate event – like losing a home to a wildfire – or families who are under threat of such an event (live in proximity to a flood zone) – or are we talking to families who are just generally anxious about the whole thing? Can they survey those people in Toronto?

There are many questions to answer before applying for research funding. Many more questions arise after that funding is secured.

Canadian climate scientists are still feeling stifled

Many of us remember the protests staged by scientists in 2013 over what they described as the ‘war on science’ being waged by the federal government at that time. Science funding was drastically cut, and the scientists who were still able to do research were prevented from communicating the results of that research to the public – which is kind of the point of doing research in the first place. An enormous amount of that muzzling was done around climate science, as the federal government sought to downplay the most dangerous effects – and even the very existence – of climate change.

Dr. Alana Westwood at the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University researches natural resource management and science. Her lab recently completed two studies into interference with environmental research in Canada. Of the 741 environmental scientists surveyed, 92% reported experiencing interference with either the conducting or the communicating of their research. Dr. Westwood, along with her research associate Manjulika E. Robertson and Master’s student Samantha M. Chu, wrote an article in The Conversation discussing their findings and the ramifications of these pervasive invisible barriers.

Since that time, the policies at the federal level have changed. In theory, this means that scientists can get back to their work and can share their results with impunity. Alana’s studies suggest that this is, sadly, not the case.

An atmosphere of uncertainty is partly to blame – for a long time, certain kinds of science went unfunded and specifically shunned. Can scientists go back to those subjects, studying pollution and endangered species and emissions? Will they get funding if they do? What about funders – there is now a fair amount of external pressure on them to fund only certain kinds of research, pressure which has not necessarily abated just because of a change in federal policy. Alana says,

“We identified interference in two categories. One is externally imposed – when a researchers’ employer is putting restrictions on their ability to conduct or communicate their research. That could come from workplace policies, it could come from their manager, senior leadership, or their communications departments. The category we found that was new and more insidious was internalized interference. This happens when researchers themselves don’t want to communicate with the media, either out of fear of being misrepresented or of public backlash.”

Climate scientists exist within a system where the trickle-down effects of the war on science are still being felt. What has resulted is that a Canadian climate science environment that became fractured a decade ago remains fractured to this day, and important work in this space has been delayed or shelved entirely.

Back in the Prime Family Lab at York, Dr. Prime says she has not felt any external pressure that could be considered muzzling, and has not experienced any interference when it comes to the subjects she chooses to tackle. This may partly be a result of her lab being so new. It might also be because until now, her lab has chosen to focus mainly on COVID. But it’s likely that a lot of the reason is that the Prime Family Lab is a psychology lab – a discipline that has not been targeted by the same kind of scrutiny and interference over the past two decades.

Psychology has a role in the climate science conversation

“I think at this point, psychology probably has a primary role in the response to the climate crisis. Climate scientists and ecologists and environmental engineers have pretty much figured out the solutions to our problems. There’s a lot of work to do still, obviously, but now it’s more about people taking up those solutions.”

Dr. Katherine Arbuthnott is Professor Emeritus from Campion College at the University of Regina. She has spent the past couple of decades studying the health benefits of connection with - and spending time in - nature. Spending time outdoors, interacting with trees and wildlife and sun, has benefits for both our physical and mental health – and it has the added bonus of nudging us in the direction of environmental sustainability.

Katherine is quick to point out that psychology has long been a science focused on individual behaviours. What makes A person do A thing. In her time as a cognitive neuroscientist she would study individual brains to look at the processes of cognition. Clinical psychologists generally work with one person at a time, to help that individual in a personalized way that works best for them. A lot of the psychology around climate change interventions has been focused in this area.

Dr. Jiaying Zhao is the Canada Research Chair in Behavioural Sustainability and an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at UBC. She has led studies like the one demonstrating that putting images of turtles and dolphins trapped in plastic debris on recycling bins and garbage cans reduced the amount of plastic waste people threw away.

“We found that when we placed those images on garbage stations, the amount of plastic waste was reduced – that is, the amount of plastic waste going into all streams, garbage and recycling alike. People are responsive to those images, and the principle is trying to connect our actions (throwing stuff away) to the downstream consequences of those actions (dolphins in distress).”

Jiaying has also launched an effort to connect sustainable behaviours with happiness. Jiaying, a behavioural scientist, collaborated with her colleague Dr. Elizabeth Dunn, a UBC psychology researcher specializing in the study of human happiness. What resulted was an idea for reframing the discussion around climate change from one of sacrifice (give up meat, shop less) to one of happiness. So many things that are better for the environment (eating more vegetables, riding a bicycle) are also things that improve our mental health and make us happier people!

Jiaying gave a TED Talk on that very subject which includes what the kids would call “hacks” to make you happier while benefiting the environment at the same time – like feng shui-ing your fridge. Or making the effort to carpool with people who can make the dreary drive in to work in rush hour traffic a more enjoyable and brain-stimulating experience.

To truly make a difference in the battle against climate change, it will take many people doing many little things, and many countries doing many big things. Individuals who do the little things are more likely to demand the big things of their communities and countries. And we’re getting there. More people than we realize are willing to take the actions that are required to stave off the worst of what climate change might bring.

Katherine speaks a lot about trust. The trust we have in other people to do the right thing, and the gap between our perceptions and the reality when it comes to the intentions of others. We, as people, tend to greatly underestimate the level of commitment in strangers to do the right thing, when in fact each of us is more likely than not to want to take actions that benefit all of us collectively. She also recognizes that truly addressing the climate crisis goes beyond simply engaging individuals to act differently.

Psychology can help. Yes, psychological science is a little late to the game. But it is now a player in the climate discussion – and can be an essential one, bridging the gap between the conclusions and solutions proposed by climate scientists and the implementation of those solutions by people and communities. Environmental scientists in Canada have been set back, and are only now starting to regain their footing. But they’ve done a tremendous amount of work over decades telling us all what’s happening and what we need to do. They are not ringing the alarm bell alone. Jiaying, Katherine, Heather, and soon Alex and many others like her will be adding their expertise in a truly interdisciplinary collaborative effort to put us all on the right path – toward sustainability, planetary health, and our own collective happiness.

The United Nations first recognised climate change as a major, urgent, global issue in 1992. In that year, the Rio Earth Summit resulted in the first international agreements on climate change. Then in 1997, the Kyoto protocol required developed countries to reduce emissions by 5% below 1990 levels – but developing countries (including China and India at the time) were exempt. Since that time, the developed countries have managed to reduce emissions by 17% (collectively). Germany had reduced their emissions 30% by 2020. The US backed out of the Kyoto accord in 2001.

More conferences, meetings, and summits have followed. 2009 in Copenhagen, 2010 in Cancun, 2011 in Durban, 2012 in Doha, 2013 in Warsaw. Agreements are reached, targets are set, countries back out, targets are missed, agreements fizzle.

In 2015, a landmark in climate change action was achieved in Paris. 196 countries signed on to the Paris Agreement, the most significant global climate agreement ever. The results? To be determined…countries can choose their own targets and there are no enforcement mechanisms to ensure they meet them. Since that time, there have been a lot more meetings…with mixed results.

All this said, many countries – including some of the most important ones – have made a concerted effort to meet the targets set by these series of agreements and accords and pacts. Although there is no enforcement mechanism by which they can be held accountable, the mere action of signing on to a global accord has, in fact, encouraged many of the world’s powers to move toward renewable energy and a greener infrastructure, though not nearly as quickly as many of us would like.

Climate progress is slow. But it is progress nonetheless. It may be frustrating. It may feel like it happens at a snail’s pace and not nearly fast enough considering the urgency of the issue. But it is happening, and hopefully the worst of what climate change could portend might be averted as a result.

In the past year, York University’s Psychology Department has joined the global 1 in 5 project. The project is a framework to allow the academic community to focus some of its collective brainpower on climate and biodiversity, and York is the first psychology department in Canada to sign on. The idea is that academic institutions commit to ensuring that one out of every five assignments, projects, or courses has an element related to climate change attached to it. Like other climate accords, agreements, and pacts, there is no enforcement mechanism, and no accountability – just the desire to improve the future for everyone on Earth.

Dr. Heather Prime, director of the Prime Family Lab at York University, has become a strong supporter of this project, which has meant incorporating climate change issues into her own curriculum as well as thinking about the climate crisis more regularly. The universities and institutions that sign on to the 1 in 5 project are not specifically held accountable for following the mandate. But there is still an effect. It may be slow – slower than we would like – but that is not on today’s researchers. The slow pace of social science around climate change is the result of years (and years) of avoiding the issue by the community at large. Says Dr. Prime,

“[The 1 in 5 project] serves as a kind of challenge to everyone to think about how you can consider climate change in your discipline. Moreover, it involves students in the process. In many ways later generations are more committed to the cause, because they’re the ones that will be most impacted.”

It has not been a straightforward process for Dr. Prime to implement the 1 in 5 mandate to her courses, and it may not yet be fully integrated. Her lab is specifically interested in family dynamics – how children develop emotionally within their families, how stressors on parents and caregivers trickle down to the kids under their care - that sort of thing. At first glance, this might not seem like the kind of place where researching climate change can have a major role. But it does.

As Heather, and her students, say – climate change is a factor in virtually every facet of our lives, which means it can have an impact in virtually every research project one can imagine. Not just in environmental science, but in the social sciences as well. Researching income inequality? That will be exacerbated by climate change. Depression and anxiety? For many those are made worse thanks to thinking about the impending catastrophe that faces us all.

And so, while the York University Psychology Department signs on to the 1 in 5 project, they are in the early stages of implementing it and have not yet reached the goal where 1 in 5 of their assignments is about climate change. As with so many climate change initiatives, it’s more of an aspiration than a firm commitment. But it has an undeniable effect.

Paul De Luca is a Master’s student in Dr. Prime’s Family Lab at York.

“I think the mandate of the 1 in 5 project is very motivating, because dealing with climate change can feel like a major uphill battle. But when you go on the 1 in 5 website and you see all these amazing projects that are currently ongoing, you feel like you’re part of a collective movement. And that in some ways informs the work I do, because I’m able to scroll through and see what other schools are working on and what other labs are doing. I can take that and let it inform the work I’m doing, and maybe identify some of the gaps. I think of it as a collective movement toward this shared goal of talking about climate change.”

It is sort of a soft target. One in five projects will be about climate change…eventually. But the mere act of signing on to the project, and to the pledge, has brought York’s psychology department into the conversation, and its students into the realm of climate-related science, and has encouraged them to think about their own particular specialties through that lens. Paul continues, talking about a study he saw on the 1 in 5 website.

“There was one proposed project about how childrens’ understanding of climate change and attitudes toward the environment change as a function of age. There was a fair amount of research from the adolescent perspective, but not so much from the vantage point of younger school-age children. When I see something like that, I start thinking about the measures we currently have that have been shown to work with pediatric populations. Do we have the tools to deal with things like knowledge of the climate crisis, attitudes toward the environment, and anxiety arising from that knowledge. And I don’t know that we currently do.”

Alex Markwell, another student in the lab, is working toward her Ph.D. and considering dissertation topics. She hasn’t paid much attention to the 1 in 5 project, and hasn’t looked deeply into it – her commitment to addressing climate change was a pre-existing condition. She does find the website and the fact that York has signed on to be encouraging.

“It’s nice to know there are a lot of other students who are interested and passionate in the same kind of things. I’ve mostly been focused on looking at the research that has been published over the past decade, but this is a good resource to look closer at what’s currently going on.”

For now, that is what the 1 in 5 project is for students and faculty at York – a resource. It’s also an aspiration. Changes to the curriculum so far have been minor. For example, Dr. Prime teaches an undergraduate class called Atypical Development, which is about the assessment and treatment of child mental health issues. For the past three years, she has assigned them a class activity centred around designing studies on COVID and families. This year, the assignment was focused on climate change.

The students came up with really interesting study designs. One proposed looking at how food scarcity relates to brain development. Another thought to track calls to crisis lines as a function of catastrophic weather-related events. A third proposed a study would look at recurring droughts in rural Canada and how that related to mental health issues. The students embraced the project, and for those who were feeling anxious about the climate crisis it was a useful way to channel efforts toward it. It’s a way of connecting people to their role in the outcome of the world.

The changes are small – but they are changes. The idea of the 1 in 5 project is fairly simple, that academics from all disciplines can come together to collectively tackle the biggest issue in the world, all by doing something small. This, it seems, is the path forward and the way out of the worst of the climate crisis – we don’t all have to change our lives to devote ourselves to this cause. We can all do little things, and observe those around us doing little things as well, and collectively that is a big deal for today and for the future.

The unprecedented numbers of wildfires in the Northwest Territories (NWT) in the spring and summer of 2023 saw more than two-thirds (roughly 70%) of the territory’s residents displaced from their homes. Much of the population was evacuated from their homes for periods exceeding a month. Some communities faced multiple evacuations. On May 14 at 4:30 pm, Katlodeche Reserve, was evacuated across the river to Hay River. At 11 pm that very evening, the town of Hay River had an evacuation notice issued with citizens from (now both) communities urged to go to Yellowknife or head south into Alberta. On June 6^th the population were allowed to return.  Then on August 12^th, the population of Fort Smith was evacuated to Hay River. Less than 30 hours later the communities of Hay River and Katlodeche faced yet another evacuation, this time to Alberta, finally able to return after September 13^th. Communities north of Hay River faced evacuations through August, with Yellowknife being evacuated on August 13^th. In total approximately 25,900 people were evacuated from their homes in the NWT during the summer of 2023.

Gerald Antoine, Grand National Chief of the Dene Nation, has called for an independent public inquiry to encourage everyone to talk about their experiences as the NWT government’s planned wildfire review does not include public engagement.

The massive evacuations of both large and small communities in the NWT this summer highlighted problems that may not be totally unique to the north, but became much more acute because of the relative isolation and the language and cultural component of many of the Indigenous communities in the north. In the past, communities that faced evacuation were typically encouraged to seek shelter in the closest larger community within the territory, thus ensuring at least some cultural and language supports were available; however, the breadth of evacuations in 2023 sent families south. For families with their own transportation and experience with travel, the evacuations, though stressful and frightening, were manageable. For families from smaller communities, or even Yellowknife, who had limited means and no transportation, the evacuation presented bigger hurdles. Families were loaded onto planes to be flown south. They were allowed to bring only 1 small backpack per person. In a number of situations the people did not even know where they were going when their planes took off. At least one flight was rerouted in mid-air and the passengers were taken to Calgary instead of Edmonton. In some cases Elders, who are unilingual speakers of their Indigenous languages, were evacuated to cities where there were no language supports. One educator reported that her grandmother was sent to Vancouver on the medical evacuation and it took the family 4 days to locate her and have a family member travel to join her to act as a translator.

The National Association of School Psychologists wrote a 2017 article about helping children and families after wildfires. Their article talks about how massive evacuations upset security and normalcy. The need to relocate, even temporarily, causes trauma, emotional reactions and coping issues.

For children and families who evacuated the NWT by road in the summer of 2023, additional stress was created by having to drive through fire on either side of the road, while also experiencing extremely poor air quality and visibility because of smoke. During this summer, families driving out of the north drove through the community of Enterprise, where 90% of the community had been burned down a few days before the northern evacuation. The sight of the burned-out community was devasting to children and adults alike.

For some students in the NWT, evacuations caused them to experience interrupted schooling through May-June and again in September before they were allowed to go home. Those students who drove back to their communities were witness to vast expanses of burned land, and active fires still burning or smoldering. Air quality was still poor. These sights made it apparent to the children that, despite being allowed to return home, the fires were still very real and close by.

The evacuations in the north were costly for families. While accommodations were provided through the Red Cross, or local disaster organizations in communities that accepted evacuees (these accommodations were paid for by the Government of the Northwest Territories - GNWT), those who were most economically vulnerable still experienced considerable economic stress. Hourly wage earners were suddenly without income, families on income support had already spent much of their monthly stipend on food that they could not bring with them during the evacuation. Promises of funding were implied by the government, but it wasn’t until near the end of the evacuation when details were shared – and evacuation financial supports were quite minimal. As a result, children and families faced food insecurity both during and after the evacuation.

Returning to the north following the evacuation exposed families to the sight of considerable changes around their homes and communities. Houses outside of their neighbourhoods had been destroyed by fire, and the burn areas approached the communities - in some cases encroaching right into them. Driving in their hometowns, children and families were constantly exposed to reminders of the evacuation and ongoing threat. Wildfires moved underground in the north, into the peat and as a result, at the time of writing (January 2024), fires are still smoldering –  issuing smoke, and sometimes bursting into flames in the burn areas. While driving the highway between communities, where there was significant burn, people are still smelling and seeing active fires. While the burns are not currently threatening homes, their very presence causes unease and worry.

The massive number of people evacuated means that everyone in every community was affected. Teachers and counsellors were touched by the evacuation and threat of wildfires, and experienced the after-effects, just as their students and their families did. The added stress of financial strain caused by the evacuations has added to food insecurity and increased financial worries for families in the north.

Steps to support staff in schools, to ensure that they can also support their students, is important. The National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) recommends that school staff be given the opportunity to share their experiences and feelings and process them so they can support their students. Staff need to be aware of possible trauma responses from their students and be prepared to share that information with parents, who might be expressing the view that their child’s behaviour has changed since the evacuations.

(Anecdotally, psychologists working in fire-affected communities are reporting an uptick in parental referrals for children experiencing anxiety and behavioural symptoms that emerged during the evacuation and have not resolved.)

Schools with counselling support should be encouraged to create group crisis intervention discussions with their students to encourage them to share their experiences, process concerns, and help them understand wildfires. In schools and districts that have school psychologists, they could be the ones leading these discussions. In the NWT there are no school- or school district-employed psychologists, but similar support could be found through mental health youth counsellors.

As the community begins to return, it is important that schools continue to provide supports that allow students the opportunity to explore and process their experiences. It’s also important to discuss concrete steps that students can take and how to involve themselves in actions that can help them develop problem-solving skills for the future.

As climate-related events cause more upheaval and disruption to large numbers of population groups, it is important that schools and systems develop plans to support both their students and their staff. As the lived experience in the NWT shows, there are stages of response – from the immediate needs that come with an evacuation to the longer-term worries, concerns and impacts that an extended evacuation will cause. School districts are encouraged to ensure they have “return to school” plans that include longer-term mental health supports for students and families. They are also encouraged to promote long-term actions regarding the climate-related crises that are becoming more and more common throughout the country.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/military-deploys-350-soldiers-to-northwest-territories-68-per-cent-of-population-evacuated-1.6527811#:~:text=Approximately%2025%2C900%20people%20have%20been,per%20cent%20of%20the%20population

In 2021, British Columbia spent late June suffering under a “heat dome”. Temperatures regularly reached 50 degrees Celsius, and by July 1^st almost 500 wildfires were burning across the province, including the one that destroyed the town of Lytton. In Nelson, in the Kootenay region, psychologist Dr. Todd Kettner was living with his wife and children in a new housing community with a small ecological footprint. The day after the final home in that community was occupied, a fire sprang up a kilometre away. These eco-friendly buildings were now occupied by anxious homeowners as embers from the nearby fire landed on their brand new roofs.

At the Kootenay Medical Centre in Nelson, Emergency Room department head Dr. Kyle Merritt was seeing patients come in presenting symptoms associated with the wildfire smoke and the heat dome. Acute cardiac events are more common when there is wildfire smoke in the area, and other health issues can become more severe with intense heat. The hospital was not overwhelmed, but there was enough of a concern for Dr. Merritt to take an additional step – and to make headlines doing so.

“I met a patient who had to be admitted because of the heat during the dome. So I made a note, the way all doctors do, indicating what’s going on when you see someone, and in my note I indicated climate change as the underlying cause. The same way you’d say a person was a smoker all their life and now they have lung cancer. You don’t diagnose someone with smoking cigarettes, you diagnose them with lung cancer – but you might write down use of tobacco as the underlying cause.”

This move caused something of a sensation, as newspapers both locally and globally picked up the story of a doctor who had diagnosed a patient with Climate Change. Of course, this was not really what Dr. Merritt had done. One cannot be “diagnosed” with Climate Change, and listing the underlying cause is not the same as the diagnosis. But a clickbait headline remains a powerful force in our society, and the story spread like mint in my garden.

Author’s note - it might be time for us to update our idioms when it comes to the speed with which something spreads. Right now, almost all of those sayings involve either pandemic-type diseases or wildfire. It seems like the wrong phrase to use given the fact that we are still dealing with a global pandemic that has killed millions, and in this case are talking about wildfires that displaced thousands and caused several deaths of their own. And so I humbly suggest “spreads like mint in my garden”. Let’s make it happen!

The heat, the fires, and the devastating problems they caused prompted Dr. Merritt  to join some colleagues in creating an organization called Doctors and Nurses for Planetary Health (DNPH). Health care professionals were seeing the direct effects of climate change on the health of the people they served, and thought they could do more. Since then the organization has expanded to include healthcare professionals of all kinds, including Dr. Kettner. They are a lobbying group, an advisory body, and a collective dedicated to making the fight against climate change a central part of their own practices in and around Nelson, B.C.

Nelson is a small city / large town in the Kootenays, with a population of about 10,000 and deep roots in the resource sector. Founded as a mining town 130 years ago, and maintaining strong ties to the forestry industry today, Nelson residents tend to feel a connection to the land around them in the way many small towns with picturesque surroundings do. Combine that with the influx of young, mostly liberal, Americans evading the Vietnam draft in the late sixties and you have the kind of town where establishing a collective like Doctors and Nurses for Planetary Health is a little easier than it might be elsewhere. As Dr. Kettner puts it, Nelson is going on “50 years of hippie-hood”.

Author’s second note – I really wanted to name this piece ’50 years of hippie-hood’ because I love the turn of phrase. I even promised, when I heard it, that I would do so. But I reconsidered at the last moment, because I am reticent to reinforce the harmful stereotype that climate action, and caring about environmental issues, is something ethereal that is solely the domain of aging hippies and young punk musicians. It is, of course, something that affects us all and something that people care about in all walks of life and across all cultural boundaries.

While the members of DNPH are environmental activists of one kind or another, it’s their position as healthcare providers that imbues their message with an authoritative tone. Dr. Kettner says “when we look at who people trust when it comes to the environment, it’s not politicians, or environmental activists or loggers or miners, it’s often healthcare professionals - nurses, or their family doctors.”

We’ve seen, over the past few years, an erosion in trust among the public when it comes to healthcare professionals. People protesting at hospitals, people disrupting life for everyone else over a false belief that the COVID vaccine is somehow responsible for people dying in greater numbers than COVID itself. While those people are the noisiest, they do not represent the majority of Canadians and doctors remain a profession that enjoys overall public trust.

This is especially true in Nelson. Another reason Dr. Merritt and Dr. Kettner and their group are able to produce results is that Nelson really is small. The people you play hockey with on Tuesday nights are the same people you see at the grocery store and the ones who reach out to you for professional help. In Dr. Merritt’s case, that means he has patients who have been under his care their entire lives. For Dr. Kettner, this means his practice and work is integrated into the community he has called home since he started his career as a psychologist nearly 25 years ago. Community connections create strong bonds, the kind that are tough to break. The kind that can weather the storm of online disinformation.

The DNPH group has been very effective in a number of ways (local infrastructure and transportation projects, reducing the footprint of their health system) but perhaps their biggest impact has been in making the connection between planetary health and human health. Recently they worked with the city to increase the delivery of electricity to homes while reducing the amount of fossil fuels in those homes. This not only benefits the environment, it improves the health of the people who are no longer living with emissions within their own walls.

Says Dr. Merritt, “you can’t have human health without a stable climate, healthy air, and healthy water. A lot of people aren’t making that connection all the time, and we try to think about it in everything we do”.

There are a lot of areas in every job where environmentally conscious and sustainable choices can be made. In healthcare-related settings, those choices almost always come with a health benefit as well. In Dr. Merritt’s case, it’s small things like ensuring the batteries used in the hospital are recycled, and bigger things like tackling the problem of anaesthetic gases and inhalers which include hydrofluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons that contribute a good deal to climate change.

“One of the advantages I have in working in primary care in a public system is that I get to interact with people from all walks of life, from cradle to grave within my community. It gives me a good opportunity to get to know what they’re going through. And in the emergency department, when events like wildfires or heat happen, it’s the most vulnerable people who are affected. And with mental health too – it’s people who have underlying mental health problems that get acutely exacerbated during these events, and they show up in the ER to compensate. Part of our role is doing advocacy for health, and climate change is now part of that.”

Author’s note number three. Dr. Kettner says that one of the things that keeps climate change top of mind for folks, and gets them to pay attention, is novel news and information. We’ve all heard a lot about polar bears and permafrost and the Great Barrier Reef for some time, and some have tuned out. Something new that might pique the interest of a person when you’re conversing could bring them back into the climate-aware headspace. Something like “hey did you know that anaesthetic gases are a significant contributor to ozone depletion and greenhouse warming?”

For Dr. Kettner, his involvement with organizations like DNPH allows him to share his expertise when it comes to the mental health effects of climate change. His work with the MIR Centre For Peace at Selkirk College has brought an additional lens of intersectionality with the climate crisis. Not only is there a crossover when it comes to health and mental health, there is a significant correlation between climate change and global peace, social justice, and inequality.

“I now feel like I’m focusing on the most important issues – the social determinants of health, greater access to mental health services for greater numbers of people, respect and reconciliation with Indigenous people. It’s where I want to focus a lot of my energy in the last 20 years of my professional career.”

Author’s note number four. While we were discussing Indigenous reconciliation, we spoke about the Haudenosaunee’s Seventh Generation Principle. It’s the philosophy they’ve abided by for hundreds of years, that states you are not only the steward of your environment for yourself and your offspring, but for their offspring and the generation after that and so on. Dr. Merritt shared what I think is an interesting thing to know – either for consideration in Canada or to one day help you win on Jeopardy! There is a new position that was created by the government of Wales in 2015. Sophie Howe completed the first term as Wales’ Future Generations Commissioner in 2023, the role is now held by Derek Walker.

There are several towns in the Kootenay region, and both Dr. Kettner and Dr. Merritt reference a sort of Springfield-Shelbyville type of rivalry between them. But this rivalry quickly disappears when it comes to achieving sustainable practices, and especially in the wake of the recent disastrous climate-related events. Dr. Kettner describes the situation as the wildfires of 2021 were abating.

“Teachers reached out to me from other towns around B.C. looking for resources to help their students with their anxiety when they returned to school after the raging forest fires that had sent them home for a month. That’s the kind of call I didn’t get as a one-on-one private practitioner seeing someone in my office for depression. Expanding our realm of influence to the public as well as to our patients is something I feel very strongly about.”

Stepping outside your immediate job always feels a little bit like a risk. It means doing something that may be outside your comfort zone, and risking a certain amount of venom from those inclined to oppose your initiative who demand you ‘stay in your lane’. It may feel a little less risky in a place like Nelson, B.C., but it still requires a little bit of daring. It’s a testament to the passion both Todd and Kyle feel, and to the immediate necessity of such action, that they have taken that step. And having done so has already made a significant impact.

Their DNPH group has been heavily involved with the city’s new Active Transportation plan, ensuring it is as sustainable and eco-friendly as possible. A number of their doctors and nurses present some of their advancements to neighbouring towns. The group is working with forestry experts on land adjacent to the city to decrease fire risk while increasing access for people to reap the mental health benefits of being able to go for a walk out in the woods. They are now being included in a lot of major decision-making, and their advice is sought on projects that have little to do with healthcare – except for the central thesis of Doctors and Nurses for Planetary Health. That is, that planetary health and human health are inextricably linked.

Author’s final note – while we were speaking, Dr. Kettner reminisced fondly about a series of TV commercials from his youth, which featured the Kokanee glacier in ads for Kokanee beer. He bemoaned the speed at which that glacier is now disappearing, an additional reminder of the devastating effects of climate change right there in their own backyard. In the course of this discussion, we discovered that Kokanee beer remains one of Canada’s best-selling brands to this day. Which surprised me, I didn’t think it was even being brewed any more, at least not since I was in high school and also saw those commercials. I thought that was interesting enough to add to this piece – Kokanee, it seems, has a great deal more staying power than I imagined it did!

Glaciers, sadly, may not have quite so much.