The Air They Breathe:

A Pediatrician on the Frontlines of Climate Change

“Isn’t it funny,” she says, “how you never think about breathing, until you can’t.”

That small comment by the mother of a wheezing baby begins a pediatrician’s moving journey into the effects of a warming world.

The baby had been brought to Dr. Debra Hendrickson’s office as smoke from a massive Sierra Nevada wildfire cloaked her town. A former environmental analyst now practicing medicine in Reno, Nevada—the fastest-warming city in the country—Dr. Hendrickson set out to explain how one little girl’s visit to the pediatrician is tied to our rapid transformation of Earth.

Through a series of vivid stories profiling children, parents, and doctors from across America, Dr. Hendrickson shows how the microscopic structures and chemical reactions of the human body are interwoven with our surroundings—how lungs, sweat glands, heart, and brain have evolved in the climate we’ve known. As the temperature of the planet rises, and those conditions shift, our health is at risk.

But the young are especially vulnerable. Because children’s organs are forming and growing every day, and because their physiology is so different from an adult’s, they are more easily harmed. Dr. Hendrickson recounts the cases of patients she’s seen in Nevada and California harmed by worsening wildfire smoke, smog, and allergies; of two boys in Arizona, stricken by record-setting heat while hiking; of children and teens who fled for their lives from Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey and the Tubbs fire; and of a 5-year-old whose life was forever altered by the Zika virus outbreak in 2015-2016.

The Air They Breathe is not just a review of the health impacts of global warming, but something more: a soul-stirring reminder of our moral responsibility to our children, and our profound connections to this unique and irreplaceable world.