Writing towards a healthier future amid climate disaster
BMJ 2024; 387 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.q1825 (Published 08 October 2024) Cite this as: BMJ 2024;387:q1825- Sarah S Grossman, writer
Weeks after I moved to the California Bay Area, I woke up to smoky skies. It was autumn of 2017, and on my bike to work at HuffPost’s downtown San Francisco office, I pedalled past people with scarves over their mouths, N95 masks. My throat scratched, a headache blossoming. At my desk, I saw the reports: a historic blaze had torn through the cities of Sonoma and Napa. I went home, got in my car and drove an hour north, towards a thickening cloud of ash. What I saw there floored me—and became the seed of what would later be my first novel, A Fire So Wild.
The neighbourhood of Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, once filled with row after row of charming two story houses and pristine lawns, had turned to ash. Hollowed out car frames and chimneys stood in a field of grey dust, dotted with black trees, spindly and bare. A few people walked around, gingerly stepping through piles of still-hot metal where their homes were, just the day before. They had fled the fire in the night and had come back to find everything gone. One woman told me: “Everything that we had is charcoal.” I cried in my car, reported back from the scene, covering the first of what would be many stories over the years of tracking the worsening heat and fires in California, wrought by our human made climate crisis, driven by fossil fuel.
At a certain point, reporting individual stories didn’t feel like enough to do justice to the breadth and grief of the crisis; the way that deadly heat combined with unequal conditions of our capitalist systems left people on the brink. A lack of affordable housing had pushed people out of rental accommodation and into living in the streets, where their lungs filled with the ash of nearby blazes. Outdoor workers were made to labour under inhuman heat, bearing the brunt of the climate crisis in their bodies as they toiled in construction or in fields to harvest food for others.
In late 2020, after covering California’s deadliest fire in a town called Paradise, a story started to take shape in the form of three families in the progressive city of Berkeley, California. One family in a house up in the hills. Another in affordable housing down in the flat area. And a couple living in their van by the shore. A wildfire slowly growing in the distance. My novel, A Fire So Wild, is about a wildfire that creeps towards Berkeley and the people whose lives are upended as the heat and smoke descend, exposing the injustices lying under the city’s surface. The book was a way to work through my climate grief, channelling my questions about how we can build meaningful lives in a world on fire.
As a writer, words are the best tool I have to work through the paradoxes of our fragile existences on this planet that we are actively wrecking, to try to imagine a more just future. And I believe each one of us has our own role to play; as health professionals, your job is among the most important, on the front lines of how the climate crisis affects people’s bodies.
Last year was officially the hottest on record.1 Deadly wildfires tore through Maui, Hawaii, and Canada. Orange skies hung over New York city in a cloud of smoke and ash. Extreme floods swept through Greece, Italy, and other parts of Europe. This summer, intense heat waves have already blanketed much of the US.2 All of these events not only kill people directly, but also take a massive toll on those who survive, impacting the mental health of all who bear witness to them.
I will never forget one mother of three who lost her home in the Paradise fire. She told me she was lucky: they had good insurance and found a rental relatively quickly. Yet, she still woke in the night crying in her sleep. She had to take a leave of absence from work to deal with the trauma she’d endured. The climate crisis impacts all our mental, physical, and emotional health.
You may wonder what one person can genuinely do when faced with the massive scale of the climate crisis. The reality that, as individuals, our behaviour makes such a small dent compared with the corporations and governments whose actions need to shift at a massive scale to stave off the worst of what is to come. I will share with you what one climate scientist I interviewed told me: it is all hands on deck.3 Onward.
Footnotes
Competing interests: no competing interests declared.
Provenance and peer review: Commissioned, not externally peer reviewed.