Full disclosure: I published this before. A few of you might even remember recommending a diary with this title back in January 2023, where I talked about climate change and diarrhea.
So this will be quick and dirty. I just want to get eyeballs on it again. It is horrifying and disgusting and something against which all of us should be up in arms. It is also an example of how the climate crisis is going to be death by a thousand cuts — a thousand tiny-not-tiny, quotidian-yet-epic, sometimes completely unexpected, cuts. Or in this case, SHITS. And yeah, sorry not sorry if that was gross.
This is neither new nor unexpected: the climate crisis, after all, is the ultimate intersectional calamity. Everything that happens on this planet (EVERYTHING!) happens within the climate.
But it is gut wrenching. Children are already so vulnerable, so underserved, so on the fraying, ragged edges of viability in so many places on this planet, that anything that seems new in the litany of challenges they face in poorer/usually browner places clutches at the heart.
From grist.com:
Diarrhea, both common and preventable, is among the most dangerous threats to young children in the Global South, where clean water and medical care are often scarce. Diarrheal diseases, and the intense dehydration that accompanies them, kill more children under 5 years old than almost anything else — more than half a million children every year — primarily in middle- and low-income countries. Many parts of the globe have made progress against the viruses, bacteria, and parasites that cause diarrhea in recent decades — but climate change is threatening to slow those advancements.
In low-income countries, many people lack access to clean municipal water and toilets. Open defecation pits are still the norm in parts of the world that lack the resources to build out sanitation systems. And people get their drinking and washing water from open rivers, streams, and ponds. During extreme flooding events, bacteria from excrement can leach into water sources and infect people. More flooding events and longer wet seasons mean more people are potentially exposed to dangerous pathogens that lead to diarrhea.
According to reporting in Forbes:
The climate crisis is destabilizing and altering the global water cycle — exacerbating a phenomenon called “dry-becomes-drier, wet-becomes-wetter.” Unseasonal heavy rains during a dry season might result in a sudden and drastic uptick in the concentrations of pathogens entering water sources.
That is all I will quote. There’s more in both Grist and Forbes on where this is happening, why it is happening, the reasons that drought is also a precursor of diarrheal illness, and the myriad harms that are being caused.
When we in the first world west think about climate change, we so often think of obvious, discrete, well-publicized harms: dying polar bears, flooding, supercharged hurricanes, sea level rise, wildfires. And we think about mitigation, and how we can escape, or plan, or move to higher ground.
But there is so much more. SO. MUCH.
This crisis is intersectional on an epic scale. We are all trapped on this planet together. We are all living on a planet that is roughly 8,000 miles in diameter, with a shallow layer of atmosphere that extends all of about 60 miles above the surface where we stand: approximately the distance from Manhattan, NY to Tom’s River, NJ.
And it is all connected. There are no barriers to the flows of gases and liquids and heat and pollution. There are no barriers to CO2 and methane emissions. There is no reason why the horrific temperatures that the Mediterranean experienced this year will not visit themselves on the American Southwest in 2024. We humans draw firm lines between countries, but nature does not.
We need to do more than we are doing. Our governments need to be pulled up by the short hairs and held to account. Fossil fuel corporations need to be brought to their knees.
And yet still we march, and sign petitions, and applaud when a minimal gesture like the new Civilian Climate Corps is enacted, rather than demand that President Biden use his executive order powers to actually declare a climate emergency.
NOAA scientist and recognized leader on the climate crisis Peter Kalmus writes (at the link above):
We’ve passed into a ferocious new phase of global heating with much worse to come. Biden must declare a climate emergency.
Using executive orders and federal agency rules, and without needing to involve this failure of a Congress, Biden could end new drilling leases on federal lands and waters, block new pipelines and effectively ban fracking. He could unleash a historic education program to counter fossil fuel industry disinformation, using the bully pulpit to build awareness and support. He could prohibit government financing of overseas fossil fuel infrastructure, end energy department fossil-fuel financing programs, ban new fossil-fuel vehicle sales by 2030, prosecute violations by fossil fuel polluters, commit to veto laws granting immunity to such criminals, and more.
Declaring a climate emergency would unleash additional powers such as banning oil exports and further accelerating renewable energy buildout on a scale not seen since the mobilization for the second world war. It would send an unmistakable signal to investors still living in the past, to universities that have been shamefully slow to divest, to media outlets that have failed to connect the dots, to all the dangerously lagging institutions of our society. And it would be a desperately needed win for climate activists.
Biden had the last opportunity of any president to keep the world under 1.5C of heating. Tragically, this opportunity has now almost certainly been squandered. However, Biden could still choose to pivot and prevent, instead of cause, even greater damage. But will he choose to do so? Or will he continue to champion oil executives and their pipelines?
Any arguments with that? Or… nah?
Now is not the time to get bummed out and sit back. I know that this is grim. I know it’s horrifying – and also gross (diarrhea) and messy, and constant, and exhausting, and not the cause to which most of thought we’d be dedicating our one mad, fabulous, precious life.
But if not us – who? If not now – when?
We need a million climate activists, and we need to do more than march.
- Asking did not work.
- Voting did not work.
- Marching did not work.
- Emissions keep going up.
- Our leaders have failed us.
#ClimateRevolution
Thank you for reading.
-Kira Thomsen-Cheek
Twitter: @KiraOnClimate
Instagram.com/climaterevolutionary