A Year In!
I want to thank all of you who have visited this website.
In this year we saw great promise: The Inflation Reduction Act, decreased deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, increases in clean and renewable energy in many parts of the world, and a slurry of lawsuits against the oil companies that hold promise, to name just a few positive developments.
On the other hand, we also saw record-breaking heat and hotter-than-ever oceans, wildfires and other climate-related disasters.
This website is a labor of love. We are not funded or monetized in any way. So given those constraints we have been very gratified at the reach of this website. In this first year we had about 4,500 individual visitors with 13,000 page views.
By far and away the most popular page was “Clinician’s Corner,” with 6,000 views, so there were many return visits as that represents around 1,500 more than the number of individual viewers, at an average of over 7 minutes per view!
Clinicians of all types, as well as public health professionals and those in related fields, are clearly on the front lines. Early in the process of considering a website I was mentored by Dr. Jonathan Fielding, Co-Director of the UCLA Center for Healthy Climate Solutions. He suggested I do something for my fellow medical practitioners. I was a bit skeptical as there is so much out there, so many groups and resources, but I felt I could help by aggregating material. And indeed, it seems the website, and particularly the Clinician’s Corner page, is serving a need. If you have suggestions to improve it, please feel free to contact us.
But I also wanted the website to be useful to individuals who are not in the medical field or related pursuits, and I still do! I wanted to open up the planetary health perspective to all who may be interested, regardless of background.
And not only about climate change. We earthlings need to protect our sources of clean water and fertile soil as well as deal with the waste and pollution we create, if we are to survive and thrive!
Luc Lewitanski, a journalist, and I also started a podcast, Your Planet, Your Health. We push each other to do deeper dives into select topics. It is a learning experience, both in doing a podcast and in the subjects we cover. We are currently finishing up an episode on how for the last 60 years or so oil companies have used their power to lie, delay and deceive for profit when they knew the truth about climate change. Not only is that the basis for the current lawsuits against the oil companies, but it is important that we learn what they are up to so we can see through their lies and the lies and betrayal by the politicians and others they have corrupted.
Why planetary health as a frame for a website and podcast on the environment? I was impressed with the view, as quoted on the website home page: “protecting nature to protect ourselves.” You don’t have to be in the health field to appreciate that!
I do recognize that, on the face of it, I am describing a self-centered, human first view. But I find, at least for me, it is honest, and perhaps less arrogant, to admit we are our problem and we have to be our solution.
I do feel it is ethical and righteous to protect nature for its own sake. We are also the environment’s problem, of course. But as Luc and I discuss, with the posthumous help of the brilliant George Carlin, in our Your Planet, Your Health podcast episode “Save the Earth?,” nature will rebound. It may take millions of years, and it won’t look the same, but nature has been through mass extinctions, huge climate shifts and immense natural disasters before, and will again after we are gone.
But we want us to succeed. To learn, to survive and thrive. For ourselves and those we love and care about.
We have entered a very dark period, and not just about the environment, but we refuse to give in to doom and gloom and despair. It is too easy, and self-defeating, a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you watch nature shows, you know sometimes the prey gets away, even with four lions on her back. The wildebeest keeps fighting, struggling to escape, and sometimes does.
Maybe, just maybe, that’s us, the one that came through, shook off the lions with immense effort and courage, and survived.
I so very much appreciate the work that Luc Lewitanski and Susan Levinson have done on this website and the podcast.
And I so appreciate you.
Let’s continue doing what we can, when we can.