Advocacy Tools

Become an Activist

This page is continually updated, so please check back for more soon!

“Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.” Dolores Huerta

Want to become an activist but not sure where to start? Interested in learning key points to speak on an issue more persuasively? Here you will find resources to help you amplify your health professional voice, understand the data, contact your government representatives, write op-eds, and more . . .

Don’t see what you’re looking for? Try our Readings & Resources, Volunteer/Engage, and our Events pages.

To join our Environmental Health or Nuclear Abolition Committee please email info@sfbaypsr.org.

HOW TO START

Think about your current work and activities, writing, teaching, speaking, etc. and then think about how you can build activism into what you already do. For example, you could write op-eds, or add environmental health curriculum to your lectures, or give a talk to your department, at a conference, or for a health professional society. The article below gives some excellent tips about how to start advocating to save the planet.

• Wired: Mary Annaïse Heglar, writer-in-residence at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in partnership with the Natural Resources Defense Council: “We Can’t Tackle Climate Change Without You”
• Need some inspiration? Read a few PSR Member Publications.

CLIMATE CRISIS and HEALTH IMPACTS

• National Academy of Medicine: Confronting Urgent Threats to Human Health and Society: COVID and Climate Change, talk
• Guardian: article on more scientifically accurate terminology to use when discussing the climate crisis

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

• Mini Medical School for the Public: The Health Emergency of Climate Change: WATCH Recorded Sessions: Co-chaired by SF Bay PSR members Katherine Gundling, MD, and Robin Cooper, MD, and including lectures by SF Bay PSR members. Produced by UCSF, Osher Center for Integrative Medicine
• The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming, a hopeful book by Eric Holthaus
  
• The New Yorker: Bill McKibben’s newsletter on the environment and climate crisis
• My Green Doctor: A Toolkit for Medical Student Quality Improvement Projects on Environmental Sustainability and Climate Change

Electrification:

To join our electrification efforts, please email tara@sfbaypsr.org and mention that you are interested in joining our Environmental Health Committee and have a specific interest in electrification.

• WATCH our event, Electrification of Buildings: Climate, Health, Justice, April 28, 2021: watch recording here.xt for spa

• This study out of Emory University links long-term exposure to air pollution, especially NO2, to death from COVID-19

• Effects of Residential Gas Appliances on Indoor and Outdoor Air Quality and Public Health in California from UCLA and this interactive story map

• Gas Stoves: Health and Air Quality Impacts and Solutions, a report from Mothers Out Front, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Sierra Club and Rocky Mountain Institute

• Blackouts and California’s Clean Energy Transition, a post from Rocky Mountain Institute

• Menlo Spark: Ten Truths about Natural Gas
• Find more resources about decarbonizing your home and buildings at fossilfreebuildings.org

NUCLEAR WEAPONS ABOLITION

• SF Bay PSR Board Member Dr. Tom Newman’s lecture: Nuclear Weapons Essentials
• American Public Health Association (APHA) adopts policy, “Towards a Nuclear Weapons Free World”
• The Asia-Pacific Journal: Will the Nuclear Powers Ever Be Willing to Forgo Their Nuclear Weapons
• #stillhere movement
• #stillhere: Learn more about the hibukusha, the survivors of the nuclear attacks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and other survivors including veterans, mine workers, and people living near test sites
• ICAN: Reports on Nuclear Weapons Abolition
• ICAN: 2-minute movie on the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty
• Back from the Brink
• American Public Health Association (APHA): The Role of Public Health Practitioners, Academics, and Advocates in Relation to Armed Conflict and War
• Arms Control Association: U.S. Nuclear Modernization Fact Sheet
• United Nations: Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
• United Nations: Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)
• Union of Concerned Scientists: I Wish I didn’t know that: Real-life close calls, screw ups, and nuclear near misses.

• Guardian: World nuclear arms spending hit $73bn last year – half of it by US
• Stanford: Evaluation of Nuclear Power as a Proposed Solution to Global Warming, Air Pollution, and Energy Security
• The Nation: We Must Resist the ‘China Threat Syndrome’
• Peace Development Fund: Recorded webinar: Climate Emergency and Nuclear War: What are the Connections?
• Moruroa Files: Investigation into French Nuclear Tests in the Pacific
• UCSF Library Archives: Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates Collection on toxics at the San Francisco navy shipyard and nearby community

JUSTICE: RACIAL, ECONOMIC, SOCIAL, ENVIRONMENTAL

• UCSF: The Repair Project: a three-year initiative designed to address Anti-Black Racism in science and medicine.
• UCLA: Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health
• NEJM: Hidden in Plain Sight — Reconsidering the Use of Race Correction in Clinical Algorithms
• NEJM: How Structural Racism Works—Racist Policies as Root Cause of U.S. Racial Health Inequities
• Environmental Health Perspectives: Environmental Racism Collection: Exposure and Health Inequities in Black Americans
• Huffington Post: The Beloved Community: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Prescription for a Healthy Society, by SF Bay PSR Board Member Jeff Ritterman
• NEJM: Beyond a Moment — Reckoning with Our History and Embracing Antiracism in Medicine
• Institute for Healing and Justice: Toward the Abolition of Biological Race in Medicine
• Othering & Belonging Institute, UC Berkeley: The Sick Side of Town: How Place Shapes Disparities in Health, A Policy Brief
• Guardian: Environmental Justice Means Racial Justice
• New York Times: Black Environmentalists Talk About Climate and Anti-Racism
• National Black Environmental Justice Network
• Racial Equity Tools
• Dr. Robin DiAngelo Discusses White Fragility
• White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh
• Sojourners: For Our White Friends Desiring to Be Allies
• Guardian: Black Americans dying of Covid-19 at three times the rate of white people
• SF Gate: SF’s COVID-19 case data by ZIP code reveals hardest-hit neighborhoods
• The New Yorker: Bryan Stevenson on the Frustration Behind the George Floyd Protests
• Obama.org: Community policing Tool Kit
• New York Times: An Antiracist Reading List, Ibram X. Kendi on books to help America transcend its racist heritage
• Time: Several Antiracist Books Are Selling Out. Here’s What Else Black Booksellers and Publishers Say You Should Read
• Equal Justice Initiative
• Black Lives Matter
• TED Talk: Alicia Garcia, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter
• Color of Change
• The African America Policy Institute: The Truth Be Told Campaign to expose state efforts to silence equity discussions, trainings, and other efforts to address systemic racism

ECONOMICS

• Total Cost of Wars and How We Could Better Spend Those Funds
• Green New Deal: Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford University and his team find low-cost, stable grid solutions in 24 world regions encompassing the 143 countries.

Divestment and Investment

• Sample Divestment/Investment Policy proposal (Word doc) that can be adapted for your institution/association/society.
• Yale Climate Connections: Investors flee Big Oil as portfolios get drilled
• Rain Forest Action Network: Banking on Climate Change: Fossil Fuel Finance Report 2020
• Running Out of Time: Why U.S. Health and Life Insurance Companies Should Divest from Fossil Fuels, a report by Physicians for Social Responsibility and Insure our Future
• 60 health and environmental groups call on health insurers to divest billions from fossil fuels
• Trump Administration Targets Banks Divesting from Fossil Fuels in New Anti-Climate Rule
• Fossil Free California: CalPERS Continues to Invest in Coal
• American Medical Association commits to divesting from toxic fossil-fuel investments

TOXICS

• Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment, University of California, San Francisco
• Environmental Working Group
• Regulatory Rollback Tracker, Environmental & Energy Law Program
• Friends of the Earth: Organic Food for All Study, eating organic reduces pesticides in your body by about 60%
• Friends of the Earth: Talking Points: Organic Diet Study on Glyphosate
• Guardian: You have pesticides in your body. But an organic diet can reduce them by 70%

FIND YOUR GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVES

• House Representatives
• Senate Representatives
• California State Assembly and Senate Representatives

ADVOCACY WRITING TOOLS

• How to Write an Op-Ed