National Nurses United

as health experts about why we need to stop polluting our air, land, and water and how our current practices are poisoning us individu- ally and spelling certain death for us as a species. Nurses will be marching as part of the People's Climate March on Sept. 21 in New York City, what is being billed as the largest march in history to bring attention to the problem of global warming and the rising sea levels, floods, droughts, famines, disease epidemics, severe storms, and other disasters that are increasing as a result of our failure to stop rising levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. The march is timed to coincide with a gathering of world leaders at the United Nations to discuss climate change. The environmental dangers are very real and present on both a macro and micro level. While fights in particular cities over particular issues are important, almost all of these conflicts can be traced back to how the corporate pursuit of profits over people continues to drive a global "extreme energy" agenda. Instead of developing and expanding clean forms of solar, wind, and sea energy, the energy industry is tak- ing dirtier, "extreme" measures to extract dirtier forms of fossil fuels that are, in turn, dirtier to refine, dirtier to transport, and dirtier to burn. These activities are not isolated to states traditionally associated with energy production, such as Texas, but affect many different areas of the country. People might be familiar with the Keystone XL pipeline, but companies are also proposing a pipeline across Maine to pump tar sands oil to Casco Bay, and expansion of existing pipelines throughout the Midwest. People might know about fracking in Penn- sylvania and Texas, but don't realize that companies also want to frack in Los Angeles, North Carolina, and Michigan. Scientists have been very clear about what is happening and what we need to do: The earth's climate is rapidly changing as a result of our unchecked emissions and we need to immediately and dramati- cally reverse course. We have already moved beyond what scientists consider "safe" levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere, about 350 parts per million, and stand at about 400 parts per million today. According to a draft report released this summer by the Inter- governmental Panel on Climate Change, governments and compa- nies have identified reserves of about four times the amount of oil, coal, and natural gas than can be burned without triggering a climate catastrophe. This means that the imperative to switch to clean energy is not because we will "run out" of these materials or can't access them, but because it is not safe for us to use those fossil fuels. "We can't keep digging dirty energy out of the bowels of the earth and calling that progress," said Erin Carrera, a post-anesthesia care RN at University of California San Francisco Medical Center. "We've seen the trends change. Cancer rates are skyrocketing; people are coming down with all kinds of rare cancers—crazy brain tumors— that we didn't used to see. Autism, asthma is up. Half of my patients have asthma. I know that a lot of us nurses don't feel like we are experts on all the data, but we really are the experts. We see the end result of what our environment is doing to the human body." One of the places where nurses have been most active in fighting for environmental justice is in the Northern California city of Rich- mond, where a Chevron refinery is located. Despite multiple fires 16 N A T I O N A L N U R S E W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G J U LY | A U G U S T 2 0 1 4 "If you know some things are harming people, it's our responsibility to look upstream and ask, 'Who or what is putting these toxins into the environment?' This is a natural fit with our mission as nurses and as a national union."

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