The Sun-docs and The Smoggies

How medicine’s climate activism pollutes the profession

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

By Anonymed (an anonymous Canadian Doctor)

I’m dating myself here, but when I was a wee baby I used to watch a show called The Smoggies, a low-budget cartoon about a group of clean-living cherubs (the Suntots) who possess a magic coral and sing about the environment all day long. Their idyllic island existence is juxtaposed with the evils of the Smoggies, a group of selfish, garbage spewing louts who occupy a rotting tanker anchored in a bay adjacent to the Suntot utopia. In each episode, the Smoggies do something environmentally dubious and the Suntots try to stop them, in the process teaching viewers a valuable lesson about conservation.

Nothing about that seems subversive. Gratuitous waste and unchecked pollution are stains on the human project. But The Smoggies also included another message, whether intentionally delivered or not: the Smoggies weren’t just messy, they were morally inferior. Their view of the world was dirty, wasteful and finite. The environmentalist view was edenic, sustainable and eternal. In the narrow context of a children’s show, the message was probably about right, but this moral manichaeism, while innocent enough when it’s used to teach kids about littering, has now extended to the real world. 

For much of my life I viewed environmental matters as people-kind’s most important challenges (and still do in many respects). I was raised by weekend-environmentalists and taught early on about the importance of planetary stewardship. In university, I worked for an American environmental group campaigning for wind power legislation. At one point I even applied (but never went) to volunteer with the Sea Shepherd group, excited by the prospect of exacting alpha-style comeuppance on illegal whaling operations and other badness. But despite the righteousness I felt in promoting wind power, and at the prospect of disrupting poachers, it never occurred to me that one side was especially virtuous and the other not. After all, I knew that many opposed to wind farms were themselves conservationists, worried, rightly or wrongly, about noise pollution, damage to livestock, and the fate of the many birds that would be killed by turbines. Similarly, while few actually supported poaching, there remained a human socioeconomic element to contend with, and this was usually acknowledged. Why were poor fishermen risking their lives to kill sharks and whales and other endangered species? The answer lay more in economics and governance than in the virtue of any particular actor.

Needless to say, nuance like that is no longer permitted. Any concern about the unintended consequences of “green energy” is derided as right-wing propaganda, and people are shouted down as shills of Big Oil or whatever. Any concern about the impact of “net zero” policies on the poor - particularly those in the developing world - is dismissed as morally dubious, as if the benefits of economic advancement in those countries, primarily by way of access to cheap fossil fuels, were inconsequential (as at least reasonable collateral damage.)

Environmentalism has always had its cranks and loons, but contemporary climate activism has a distinctly religious flavour to it. It is at once anti-human (to the point of Malthusian) and chock-full of the most characteristically human conceit. Reason has been largely replaced by dogma and (ironically?) only binary positions are permitted. If you say, for instance, that climate change (I’ll use the term for clarity, with the caveat that it’s a loaded term) is a problem on the order of hundreds of years - and that while, yes, it needs attention, it ought not to come at the expense of fighting poverty or of safeguarding individual liberty - you are treated as a heretic. Nothing but the Greta Thunberg-we’re-all-gonna-die-in-twelve-years-unless-we-embrace-an-austere-socialist-utopia line will do. Environmental matters have been repackaged as the all encompassing “climate change”, and the ever-evolving process of planetary stewardship funneled into acute panic about a climate crisis. Something that ought to have remained apolitical has become yet another front in the culture wars. If you want to be on the right side of history you must believe that history will come to an end in a few short years. You must believe that “the people” are the problem, and technocrats the solution.

I have lamented many times in these pages that Canadian medicine is now a far-Left enterprise. Like law, psychology, education, and the academy, medicine has embraced radical race politics, “indigenization”, and trans hysteria. It censors anyone not on board with systemic racism-cops-are-murderers propaganda, demands deference to indigenous “ways of knowing” and dubious claims of “ongoing genocide”, and grades students in accordance with their acquiescence to logic and language-defying pronoun regurgitant. But it also cares about bigger, global issues. It cares about “sustainability.” It cares about our little blue dot.

In 2021 a Canadian doctor from (where else) British Columbia made international news when he became the first physician (like, ever!) to diagnose a patient with…climate change. According to the dozens of articles written about the case, a patient presented to the local emergency department complaining of malaise and difficulty breathing. She was also apparently overheated, dehydrated and displayed other symptoms of “heat stroke.” It was an especially hot mountain summer. Forest fires were roaring as they do, the air quality was poor and so was the woman (there was some suggestion that her lack of home air conditioning had been a contributor). She also suffered from a variety of non-climate ailments, including heart failure and diabetes. Given her state, this physician felt it morally necessary to write CLIMATE CHANGE (I imagine he capitalized it) as the diagnosis - a world first.

Except that he didn’t. The article itself is worth reading, if for no other reason than as a case study in the rot that is postmodern journalism. Every headline related to the story trumpeted the first diagnosis of “climate change”. If you read on, however, you find out the doctor didn’t actually do that. He documented it as an antecedent, which is still pretty douchey, but isn’t at all what the many articles claimed. So they lied, straight away. This isn’t revelatory of course, but it’s still gross. Next comes the perennial propensity to frame forgone conclusions as discovered truths. According to CTV, the doctor in question “made the controversial diagnosis over the summer, saying the symptoms a patient in her 70s was seeing all tied back to one thing [sic]. Those effects included heatstroke, dehydration and breathing issues. As he treated the patient, he started thinking about underlying issues. He ultimately diagnosed her with climate change.” The article thus paints this man of medicine as a neutral observer, interpreting the facts as they come through the door and coming to a logical conclusion. In reality, as we later find out, he is actually a member of “Doctors for Planetary Health,” an environmental activist group whose very raison d’être seems to be to parrot Greta Thunberg talking points in an echo chamber of self-righteousness. If my own limited experience with its members means anything, these are not scientifically-minded concerned citizens, but political actors whose concept of climate change ranks up there with the neo-Malthusian hysterics of the 1970s.

The whole thing was absurd on many levels. Doctors don’t list risk factors for a disease as the diagnosis, so unless that physician thought the patient had climate change in the way one has gonorrhea, it makes no sense medically speaking. Even the most propagandistic doctor would surely refrain from such frivolity. What’s more, patients tend not to pay much mind to their hospital paperwork, and so it seems likely that this story was pitched to the press by a member of the medical staff. If true, this means all the surprise at this doctor doing this unprecedented thing was about as authentic and spontaneous as gluing one’s hands to a Goya.

The inanity of this particular episode aside, Climate Change (capital ‘C’, capital ‘C’) is now at the top of the medical establishment’s priority list (right up there with denouncing imaginary racism and un-binarying the kids) and is now routinely referred to as a “public health crisis.” Caring about planetary stewardship is a good thing when that’s what it’s actually about, but like so-called systemic racism, the new environmentalism is now so devoid of context or true solutions (beyond those advocated by anti-natalists), that it’s tempting to toss the tree-hugging baby into the darkest depths of hades with the sulfur-scented bathwater. I'm not prepared to do this just yet, but when a group of know-nothing physician-activists presumes to tell me what I need to do in order to remain a virtuous citizen of the planet, I’m tempted.

Medicine is understandably concerned with public health matters - it’s part of the job. But in a political environment increasingly devoid of perspective or proportion, anything can be framed as such. Anything can justify measures large and small to protect the public from that crisis. It begins, as it always does, with changing language. Like genocide, harm, trauma and others, the terms “crisis” and “epidemic” have been so distorted that we now readily apply them to just about anything the Left believes will further their aims. In recent times, we have been told there are epidemics of racism, sexism, transphobia and Islamophobia, even as tolerance and equality have improved dramatically. Any one of these, it seems, can be made a public health emergency when it suits. And as we know all too well from COVID, once the label is affixed, all bets are off where debate and dissent are concerned. Given recent history, climate activism seems like just the next phase of a never-ending war against the liberal sovereignty of the individual.

Occasionally a colleague of mine forwards emails from the dean of one of Ontario's more “progressive” medical schools (which is saying something), in which this academic leader expounds on her vision of what her institution stands for. Particularly since 2020, this newsletter has been packed full of paens to social justice advocacy, anti-racism “work”, and the boldness of those students who dare to advocate for the same things everyone else now does. Most of these emails are little more than boilerplate woke-speak about the need to have “uncomfortable conversations”, “ask hard questions” and other euphemisms for placating the mob.

In recent months, however, the issue of climate change has come up more and more. What’s disquieting about this perennially hot topic (pun) is that it’s never seen through a traditional environmentalist lens. It’s not about “going green” as a campus. It’s not about responsible citizenship in day to day life. It’s about a particular utopian vision. In the case of medicine, it’s about the idea that climate change writ large is a public health crisis, right now. As such, it is something to be taught, like systemic racism, within the confines of medical education. At bottom, this is a surreptitious way of forcing young doctors to educate themselves in a particular brand of woke activism, not in spite of their role as (future) physicians, but precisely because of it. Fossil fuels are the new smoking as Doctors for Planetary Health would say.

One such email contains the following reference to impending Armageddon: “With every missed opportunity for action, we are barreling toward catastrophe, eyes wide open. The oceans are a mess, the arctic is melting and [the region] could lose everything from its air quality to its wildlife to its food and water security. If we don’t act now - right now - ours will be a story of collective inaction, and it will make for a pitiful epitaph for our species.”

That’s pretty dark, but even if it were less alarmist, it would still mean reshaping medicine as a grand activist discipline.

Part of the problem with this kind of thinking is that it views all of medicine primarily through a public health lens - that is, top down. This is hardly surprising - the radical left sees all institutions the same way - whether it be government, the legal system or medicine. The most important unit of analysis is always the macro, the bureaucracy, the greater good. The dignity of the individual is the benefactor, the result, of that greater good, not its antecedent. To me, this outlook is as dangerous in medicine as it is in society broadly. When the backbone of medicine is made up of lofty, superordinate goals rather than the brick and mortar of the individual doctor-patient relationship, the profession becomes something else.

Another problem with the emphasis on climate activism “in our curriculum, policies and infrastructure” is that, pragmatically, it takes away from learning medicine. Standards in medical school are already lower than they ought to be, and criteria for entry have slowly eroded over the years. For instance, it is apparently quite discriminatory to expect students to know things about science before medical school. Forget the slow death of the MCAT - for a long time now many applicants have not been required to complete a single science or math course prior to being admitted. To pretend this has no impact on physician abilities is lunacy. Indeed, many such students freely admit that they leave undergraduate medicine with a less than stellar understanding of even the basics of applied physiology. With time limited as it is, the injection of evermore social justice learning into curricula is a recipe for terrible doctors. Even if such material were not politicized, it would still mean students learning less about the thing that ought to matter: practicing medicine. 

Lastly, the push to incorporate climate activism into medical school curricula is, all things considered, highly hubristic. Our newfound woke certainties have apparently given us magic powers. Not only will we treat your diabetes and your heart condition, we will also defeat racism, reinvent biological man, and save the planet, too! This is narcissism in the extreme. We have a genuine healthcare crisis on our hands - that is, not enough doctors and nurses to meet the needs of the population. And yet we continue to hobble our new recruits with the idea that they must do more and be more. I shudder to think how much productivity is lost to vanity projects like Doctors for Planetary Health; how many patients are not seen (or seen properly) because their doctor has been trained to be part physician, part social worker, and wholly activist.  

Early on in medical school, I attended a conference that was far too advanced for my level. Too afraid to mingle, I eavesdropped instead. Older generations of doctors are known to be jaded and curmudgeonly, and I remember listening in as one such gentleman was boring a young resident with the “facts of life”: “people always go into medicine thinking they’re gonna change the world. Well they aren’t. We don’t change anything. If you want to change the world, send in the engineers.” Cynical as it might have been, I never forgot that statement. Though at the time it sounded like the sigh of futility, I now view it as a call for humility and self-awareness. As American satirist PJ O’Rourke is often quoted as saying: “everyone wants to save the world; no one wants to help mom with the dishes.” This is true, and doubly so now. Small gestures cut against the fundamental narcissism of our time. Everyone wants to eradicate racism, save the planet, liberate women (except the Muslim ones), and usher in a utopia unlike any we have ever seen. 

Medicine need not save the world. This is not our task and it is vanity to pretend otherwise. It is not on us to create some impossible utopia where the fires don’t burn and the rivers don’t rise. But we can set an example for the world by doing what we are meant to do. We can take care of our patients - in the moment, with dignity, as individuals. In those moments there is no good and bad. There are no Suntots and Smoggies. There is only the patient in front of us. The rest is smoke.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, Cancellation and the void

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