Letter: Climate and Health - it's here

As originally published in the Concord Monitor January 3rd, 2026

For reasons we don’t know, nor need to know, our planet Earth is alive in a galaxy that seems to be little more than rock, gas and space. Yet, we live in a country that seeks to instill a normalized game of permanent rules and divisive structures atop a living organism. Our society, with its pursuit of dominance via labor, construction, technology and blood is building a cancer through the raw materials of Mother Earth … including our own souls. We, collectively, have adapted to this game via a sort of collective surrender. A dangerous apathy of repetitive movements between work, home, family, faith, shopping and beyond. As someone who has worked for years in climate change and public health research, alongside other scientists, health care practitioners, and professors, this “normal” is so very far removed from sanity.

Does music seek rhythm, or does it uphold the stillness between chords? They go together. So too do our bodies go together with each other, our communities and our planet. The constant pursuit of individualized culture, consumption and “growth” is hurtling our species to our own manufactured doom. Our lungs were never meant to breath aerosolized fuel. Our mouths were never meant to drink chemical contaminated water. Our stomachs were never meant to eat undigestible ultra-processed food in mass. Our bodies and families were never meant to be held in isolated containers and insulated via the constructed worlds in which we inhabit. On our only home we must labor and pay fellow brethren who hold the keys to the very locks on our doors to have a patch of grass in the sun for our children to play. If you’re lucky enough.