The Climate Crisis Is Wrecking Our Health. This Doctor Has a Radical Cure.

Daphne Chouliaraki Milner

To begin, I’d love to hear what first sparked your interest in the connection between ecological systems and human health, and what ultimately led you to write a book about it.

Dr. Wendy Johnson

I had a bit of a winding path to medical school, which I touch on in the book. I actually started undergrad pre-med, but after struggling in chemistry, I switched to majoring in English and Political Science. After college, I worked in the Ohio legislature and then became the statewide organizer for the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. This was around 1990. So I was deeply involved in environmental and political organizing.

I came to feel that to really shift political conversations, you need to understand people’s lives at the grassroots level. So, in a somewhat unusual twist, I decided to go to medical school—to hear people’s stories. That was my way of becoming a better activist and policy thinker. I had to retake chemistry—this time with a woman professor in a smaller class—and did fine.

Even in medical school, I felt something was missing. So I pursued public health to better understand what I refer to in the book as “the other 80%,” all the factors shaping people’s health outside the clinical setting: their environments, their relationships, their sense of connection. But even in public health, the focus was often on individual behavior change, not on improving systems or environments.

And especially here in New Mexico, where I live, I feel deeply connected to the land and the community. That relationship supports my own well-being, and I wanted to explore how important that kind of connection is more broadly. Ultimately, I began to see this as the key to addressing personal health, as well as how we live more sustainably on the planet.

After 30 years of practicing medicine, I’ve become more frustrated with how constrained the U.S. health care system is: what it pays attention to, what it ignores, who has access. As I listened to patients’ stories, I began to realize how ill-equipped we are to address the root causes of ill health. That frustration is what motivated the book. 

People ask how long I’ve been writing the book, and I sometimes say, “My whole life.” I’ve always been a writer—I once contributed to a volume about international health activists—but writing a full book was a new kind of project. I started seriously working on it about 10 years ago.