Climate change
NEARLY 50 years ago, in the summer of 1969, Time magazine published photos of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River in flames, searing the images into the national consciousness.
The Cuyahoga River on fire became a lasting symbol of environmental damage and pollution — and a tipping point that helped galvanise Americans to take action and Congress to enact landmark environmental legislation, including the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act. Together, these laws save hundreds of thousands of American lives every year.
The National Climate Assessment paints a clear picture of the much larger environmental crisis that the United States confronts today: global warming. According to the report by 13 federal agencies, global warming will harm our ecosystems and our economy.
Yet we continue to meet the rising temperatures, superstorms, drought and megafires brought about by climate change with relative inaction.
Although the environmental costs of global warming may still seem distant to some Americans, there is a growing threat that many may find harder to ignore: infectious disease.
As another new report, the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, makes clear, warming poses a diversity of risks for human health.
More and more, hot summers will increase mortality and limit our capacity for outdoor labour. Superstorms in some regions will cause flooding of sewage systems and thereby spread gastrointestinal disease, while severe droughts in other regions will increase rates of asthma. Food production will be severely reduced in many countries. Many regions will see increased risks of infection.
Although environmental destruction may not scare us in an immediate way, infectious diseases very well could. Indeed, the impacts on human health could become the burning river of the 21st century.
As a result of climate change, we will need to expand our concept of public health to include the broader environment. To protect the health of our own bodies, humans must also care for the natural world around us.
The fires on the Cuyahoga River were a watershed moment for environmental awareness in the United States. The diseasescarred faces of Americans in the heartland may be next.