How One Boston Doctor And Her Family Confront Climate Change

Elizabeth Pinsky unlocks her son Ben’s bicycle before heading home for the day. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

The image — of a child and an animal skeleton in a drought-stricken landscape —popped open just below a headline about the rapidly advancing effects of climate change. The story — about a United Nations report — described a world at risk for crises triggered by drought, flooding and extreme heat by 2040.

Before reading that report in October 2018, climate change was a big, distant, looming threat for Dr. Elizabeth Pinsky, but not something to tackle or even think about every day. But in the weeks that followed, Pinsky began waking in the night, picturing a scorched earth.

“My children are going to be searching for water in a post-apocalyptic wasteland,” Pinsky says, describing the darkest moments in her dreams. “Not just, my kids don’t have the future that I want for them. My kids don’t have a future.”

In the light of day, Pinsky, a pediatrician and child psychiatrist, gave herself some therapeutic advice: Do something. Now every daily action and decision for Pinsky and her family includes this question: What will help save the Earth?

“We can’t turn away from this at all anymore,” Pinsky says. “It needs to be something that is part of the like drumbeat of our lives and what we’re doing.”

Read the rest of the story at WBUR’s website.