Search
Log in
  • Home

  • Categories

  • Audiobooks

  • E-books

  • For kids

  • Top lists

  • Help

  • Download app

  • Use campaign code

  • Redeem gift card

  • Try free now
  • Log in
  • Language

    🇫🇮 Suomi

    • FI
    • EN

    🇧🇪 Belgique

    • FR
    • EN

    🇩🇰 Danmark

    • DK
    • EN

    🇩🇪 Deutschland

    • DE
    • EN

    🇪🇸 España

    • ES
    • EN

    🇫🇷 France

    • FR
    • EN

    🇳🇱 Nederland

    • NL
    • EN

    🇳🇴 Norge

    • NO
    • EN

    🇦🇹 Österreich

    • AT
    • EN

    🇨🇭 Schweiz

    • DE
    • EN

    🇸🇪 Sverige

    • SE
    • EN
  1. Books
  2. Climate, nature, and animals
  3. Climate and geography

Read and listen for free for 42 days!

Cancel anytime

Try free now
3.0(1)

The Air They Breathe : A Pediatrician on the Frontlines of Climate Change

A timely, revelatory first look into the impact climate change has on children—the greatest moral crisis humanity faces today—by a pediatrician in the fastest warming city in America.

Wildfires, hurricanes, and heat waves make headlines. But what is happening in Debra Hendrickson’s clinic tells another story of this strange and unsettling time. Hendrickson is a pediatrician in Reno, Nevada—the fastest warming city in the United States, where ash falls like snow during summer wildfires. In The Air They Breathe, Dr. Hendrickson recounts patients she’s seen who were harmed by worsening smoke, smog, and pollen; two boys in Arizona, stricken by record-setting heat while hiking; children who fled for their lives from Hurricane Harvey and the Tubbs Fire; and a little girl whose life was forever altered by the Zika virus outbreak in 2016.

The climate crisis is a health crisis, and it is a health crisis, first and foremost, for children. Children’s bodies are interwoven with and shaped by their surroundings. As the planet warms and their environment changes, children’s health is at risk. The youngest are especially vulnerable because their brain, lungs, and other organs are forming and growing every day, and because their physiology is so different from that of adults. Childhood has always been a risky period of life; throughout history, babies and children have met peril, from polio to famine, from cyclones to war. Yet they have never quite had to face, in quite this way, the potential loss of the future itself.

The Air They Breathe is not just about the health impacts of global warming, but something more: a soul-stirring reminder of our moral responsibility to our children, and their profound connections to this unique and irreplaceable world.


Author:

  • Debra Hendrickson

Narrator:

  • Megan Tusing

Format:

  • Audiobook
  • E-book

Duration:

  • 6 h 54 min
  • 237 pages

Language:

English

Categories:

  • Climate, nature, and animals
  • Climate and geography
  • Nonfiction
  • Medicine and nursing

Others have also read

Skip the list
  1. Doctored

    Charles Piller

    audiobook
  2. Red Scare : Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America

    Clay Risen

    audiobook
  3. My Life: Growing Up Native in America

    audiobookbook
  4. The World That Wasn't: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century

    Benn Steil

    audiobook
  5. Treaty Justice : The Northwest Tribes, the Boldt Decision, and the Recognition of Fishing Rights

    Charles Wilkinson

    audiobook
  6. Hope in Hell : A decade to confront the climate emergency

    Jonathon Porritt

    audiobookbook
  7. Black Detroit : A People's History of Self-Determination

    Herb Boyd

    audiobook
  8. The Crazies : The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West

    Amy Gamerman

    audiobookbook
  9. My War Criminal : Personal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide

    Jessica Stern

    audiobook
  10. California Against the Sea : Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline

    Rosanna Xia

    audiobook
  11. Seeing Red

    Michael John Witgen

    audiobook
  12. The Survivors of the Clotilda : The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade

    Hannah Durkin

    audiobook

  • 1 book

    Debra Hendrickson

    Debra Hendrickson, MD, is a board-certified pediatrician in Reno, Nevada. She is an associate clinical professor at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, where she lectures on the impact of early childhood experiences (such as poverty and trauma) on long-term health. She has an honors degree in environmental studies from Brown University and was an environmental analyst and planner in New England and Seattle for ten years before attending medical school. Dr. Hendrickson has received many awards for academic achievement and research in both environmental studies and medicine. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, a member of its Council on Environmental Health and Climate Change, and a founding member of Nevada Clinicians for Climate Action. She has three children.

    Read more

Help and contact


About us

  • Our story
  • Career
  • Press
  • Accessibility
  • Partner with us
  • Investor relations
  • Instagram
  • Facebook

Explore

  • Categories
  • Audiobooks
  • E-books
  • Magazines
  • For kids
  • Top lists

Popular categories

  • Crime
  • Biographies and reportage
  • Fiction
  • Feel-good and romance
  • Personal development
  • Children's books
  • True stories
  • Sleep and relaxation

Nextory

Copyright © 2025 Nextory AB

Privacy Policy · Terms ·
Excellent4.3 out of 5