Planetary Fever: Climate Change and the Medical Profession

Climate change is a major challenge facing human societies in the 21st century. In the complexity of its causes and breadth of its consequences, it touches on virtually all dimensions of human existence and social organisation, one of these dimensions being human health. In consideration thereof, members of the medical profession have become engaged in climate activism and advocacy in various forms, from patient communication to direct action efforts. Despite the rise in prominence of these efforts, little attention has been given to this phenomenon within social scientific research on climate change. To address this lacuna, this thesis explores how climate change is constructed, engagement with the issue is given meaning, and the efficacy in the pursuit thereof is understood by medical professional climate activists and advocates. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this work analyses medical climate activism and advocacy through a Bourdieusian framework as a practice unfolding in particular social sites (fields), informed by sets of fundamental presuppositions (doxa), structured in its meaning by dispositions (habitus), and drawing on the operationalisation of particular resources in its pursuit (capital). This analysis shows medical climate activism and advocacy to rest on careful negotiations between—in some parts congruent and others incongruent—medical and radical ecological sensibilities and commitments. This thesis contributes to three distinct efforts. Empirically, it presents an in-depth account that illuminates and positions a contemporary practice of civic engagement on which to date little research exists. Theoretically, it advances the application of Bourdieu’s thinking tools to the sociological study of climate change in particular and negotiated practice at the intersection of different fields more broadly. Practically, it develops suggestions for the facilitation of this engagement by stressing the importance of the social determinants of health model, the congruence of climate concerns and medical practice, and the availability of supportive networks.