Board Member Sarah Schear published in AAP Voices: It’s Time to Wake Up to Threat of Climate Change and to Act

As pediatricians and trainees, we have all experienced moral awakenings that have compelled us to take action to protect children.

As I step outside each day in San Francisco during the pandemic, putting on my mask reminds me of a time of moral awakening: the fall of 2018, when the Camp Fire raged through Paradise, California. I remember the sharp smell of smoke seeping through my apartment windows in San Francisco and wearing an N95 mask as I walked through haze to and from the labor and delivery unit for my OB-GYN rotation.

It felt so wrong to me that the babies born in that unit would soon breathe such air. And now, wildfires rage again in the West, darkening the skies and threatening our respiratory health.

READ MORE in the American Academy of Pediatrics Voices magazine