Yes, we read the summary of that report. This is information that we weren’t talking about just a few years ago. Everyone was talking about carbon dioxide emissions without really looking at methane and the concentrated nature of that greenhouse gas emission. For students, it has been a real awakening to understand this. But they tend to be on budgets so they face a struggle in which they say, “I want to eat better, but my pocketbook only allows this much, so what am I going to do?” There was one student who came in saying that he ate burgers every single day. By the end of the semester, he was eating fewer burgers, but more importantly, he was really clear on what the supply chain was that brought that burger to his plate. He was recognizing not only the animal that had given up his life but the resources that had been depleted, what the farmers had been paid, and how the workers had been treated in the factory. Hopefully that information will stay in his mind and he will make better choices.

The Leopold study that was done at the University of Iowa, indicating that our food travels over 1500 miles from farm to fork, was surprising to students. We live in an ag state, yet our food is still traveling these huge distances to reach us. Why is there this disconnect? Why is our food system so out of whack? Where can we look and what can we do as citizens to start to make a difference?

The British medical journal, The Lancet, recently ran a major article which concluded that global climate change is the greatest health threat of the 21st century. Is that your sense and, if so, why is this not more widely recognized yet?

You know, climate change has needed a much better public relations company. I’m making a joke here, but someone needs to do a lot better PR for the planet than we’ve had. Climate change has been an extraordinarily divisive issue. Media didn’t do a good job, NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] didn’t do a good job…

Climate change is an extraordinary health concern. It doesn’t get talked about enough because climate change, in general, has not been spoken about in ways that resonate with enough people. We talk about the number of degrees of the planet heating up, and we talk about sea level rise, but we have not made this tangible for people. If you say the temperature will rise here in Kansas and we will see increased rates of malaria because the mosquito population will proliferate, then that’s something that people can get their heads around.

But abstractions have not worked for people. We thought that maybe – when I say we, I mean environmental storytellers – that facts would really engage people. But I don’t think that people can tell the temperature difference between [global climate change of] one degree Celsius and two degrees Celsius. I’m not convinced that telling people that swapping out light bulbs will be the equivalent of taking a million cars off the road, or two million cars off the road, actually means anything to them. It sounds like a lot, don’t get me wrong. But speaking for myself, it doesn’t stay with me. I can’t discern the difference in those orders of magnitude. I think the more we can talk about public health, the better chance we have of actually engaging people.

From your perspective, what are some of the public health issues that might connect in a visceral way with people who may just be engaged in other activities and not thinking about this? What is there with people’s health that they might connect to? Not having enough water to drink, that’s one. Not having enough water to grow food with, that’s another…

See, you’re on a great roll. Not being able to breathe the air, that’s another one. The pollution. In the 1970s, when we galvanized around the Clean Air Act, seeing smog is what galvanized people. We have to make the invisible visible for people. Also, we can’t keep talking about everything over these long time horizons. There are some great reports that have come out for the state of Kansas, and for other states, about what will happen in response to climate change by the year 2100.

When we’ll all be dead.