Waking up panicked at 3 am on the morning of November 9th, I was shocked to find the results of the American presidential election: Donald Trump had won.
Of all the issues a Trump presidency presents, one in particular hits home for the Healthy Pharmacist.
On a daily basis, I champion healthy habits and advocate for others to take responsibility for their health through improved diet, increased exercise, and reduced stress. Although these choices are relatively personal, wellness is sometimes beyond our control.
For those who try to maintain peak health, it is frustrating to be surrounded in an environment that makes wellness an uphill battle. Take for instance, the air you breathe.
Each day your lungs bathe in the surrounding air, absorbing and circulating whatever particles it contains, spreading them to each organ of your body to be used for growth and repair.
Due to pollution, many of the airborne substances incite an inflammatory response in in the body which can have huge impacts on your health and lifespan. Whether you live close to highways, spend hours driving on freeways, or live removed from fresh mountain air, microscopic pollution can be especially bad for your health. China, for example, had over 350,000 deaths directly attributed to the pollution caused from the burning of fossil fuels.
Pollution itself has direct consequences on health. More subtly, the process that leads to pollution–the burning of fossil fuels–can also have significant effects on your health through climate change which can change the environment and negatively affect the availability of food & water and increase the spread of disease. The effects of climate change are so meaningful to health that even the Centers for Disease Control has labeled climate changed as a threat to human health and prioritized action to combat it.
Despite these concerns, as Americans, we have a governing body that looks out for our air quality, preserving our environment and our health and leading action against climate change–the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
This brings me to my point of contention with a Donald Trump presidency. Trump believes climate change is a hoax and strongly denies the fact supported by over 97% of climate scientists, that climate change is real and is having increasingly drastic effects on our planet.
For more commentary on the topic, I recommend watching a recent 2016 Leonardo DiCaprio and National Geographic documentary.
My fear of a Trump presidency isn’t so much that his denial will lead to climate change complacency, but more that he is proactively seeking to dismantle the environmental safeguards we have in place. Our president-elect has so far appointed an adamant climate change skeptic to lead the EPA transition team and threatened to terminate a global agreement to reduce greenhouse emissions, which consist of over 190 participating countries.
It is disturbing to think how a changing climate will pervasively affect our health in more disastrous ways.
As global temperatures rise from increased greenhouse gas emissions, the ocean surface temperatures will rise, the ice caps will melt, biodiversity will shrink and climates will become more extreme. Droughts will be more severe and prolonged, changing what food is available and where clean drinking water can be accessed. In other areas, floods will be more frequent and destroy larger and larger areas of developed land, displacing families and creating American refugees. And this is only the start of changes.
In a more uncertain climate, our industries will also change. Unlike Trump, these corporations understand the need for environmental regulations and have urged Trump to keep America’s promise to combat climate change.
Regardless of the political stance you choose, ignoring the facts of climate change will irreversibly change this planet and will directly impact your health. Be a champion for health. And now more than ever, be a champion for the environment.
The Healthy Pharmacist 
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