CHAPTER 1

The Sickness of Climate Change

In August 28 of 2011, northern Vermont received seven inches of rain. Tropical Storm Irene alternated between a steady and torrential rain for a full twenty-four hours. Our office—where we practice acupuncture and herbal medicine—overlooks the Winooski River in the town of Burlington. In one day, the character of the river had changed dramatically. On the Saturday before the storm, you could walk across the 150-foot expanse between its banks. The water was shallow and flat, quietly flowing past large and small exposed rocks.

After a day of continuous rain on Sunday, by Monday morning there was a very different view from our clinic. The river was raging and had become a Class V rapid outside our office’s front door. Large rocks that previously sat well above the waterline were now shooting water ten feet straight up into the air. There were twelve- to fifteen-foot swells where the river ascended and cascaded down boulders and other obstacles in its path. The quiet from two days earlier had been replaced with the raw thundering of the powerfully rushing water. It was so loud that the several dozen people standing on the embankment above the river were scarcely talking to each other.

There were likely two reasons for how quiet they were. First, the river was so loud that it was nearly impossible to communicate. Second, we were still in the midst of digging out from the effects of the previous flood that occurred just five months earlier. Those of us standing above the river were likely aware that if it continued to rise, there was nothing we could do about it.

What was before the storm a five- to six-foot embankment of rock and dirt at the edge of our office parking lot was now covered in frothy, mud-colored water. The river started to lap over the top of the three-foot-high cement reinforcement blocks and spread throughout the parking lot. The building’s maintenance workers began to pile sand bags along the river’s edge and run a sump pump at the low spot of the parking lot to try to move the pooling water. But it was clear that if the river continued to rise, it wouldn’t make much difference. We knew there was a strong possibility of another major flood. During my five hours at the office, the river had risen as many feet.

What happened in Burlington also happened in much of the rest of Vermont, and is part of a larger, global process. Across the state, whole bridges and roads had been washed away. In the town of Brattleboro, located in the southeast corner of the state, the entire downtown had been submerged under several feet of water as multiple rivers nearby breeched their banks. In Rockingham, north of Brattleboro, a covered bridge originally built in the early 1800s had washed downstream, and a video of the incident was posted on YouTube. In the middle of the state, the downtown area of Waterbury, including much of Main Street, was under several feet of water. Speaking on what had been happening across the state, National Weather Service hydrologist Greg Hanson said early Monday, “From what we’re seeing, this is one of the top weather-related disasters in Vermont’s history.”1

As my wife, Liz, and I periodically looked down from our third-floor office window, what we were seeing directly below our Chinese medicine clinic felt like an important analogy for what was happening all around Vermont. Acupuncture needles, meridian charts, and medical texts surrounded us inside the office, and outside the water was surging and rising below us. The river that was low, smooth, and quiet just thirty-six hours before was now raging, gushing high into the air, and on the verge of flooding.

With this view of the river from our clinic in mind, the importance of Chinese medicine’s emphasis on looking below the surface becomes clear. Rather than focusing on treating only symptoms themselves, for thousands of years Chinese medicine has stressed the importance of understanding where symptoms come from. Even though the flooding severely affected the people and the landscape of Vermont, it was a sign—a symptom—of larger and deeper issues.

Chinese Medicine’s View of Symptoms: From Headaches to Flooding Rivers

When treating patients, Chinese medicine practitioners work to treat the root causes of symptoms, instead of only the symptoms themselves. Whether mild or life-threatening, symptoms are indicators of deeper imbalances. With headaches, for example, there are many methods for relieving and eliminating the associated pain. But if we don’t attempt to understand the root causes of the headache, we aren’t listening to what the symptom is trying to tell us. Rather than seeing them as conditions to eliminate, we can approach symptoms as messengers and listen to the messages they are delivering. Symptoms of all kinds—from headaches to flooding rivers—are trying to get our attention and let us know that something is out of balance. The more severe a symptom, the more urgently the messenger is trying to deliver the message.

There are, of course, many ways to greet the messenger. We can ignore it, and hope that our symptom will just go away. Sometimes this seems to work well, especially if the symptoms are mild and we are generally healthy. In many cases, however, the same messenger—or a different one—will return because we haven’t taken the time to listen to or translate the message.

Part of the difficulty in listening to symptoms is that our dominant cultural and medical view espouses an approach based on separation. For example, we assume that we are separate from nature, our organs are separate from our other organs, and our body is separate from our mind and emotions. This separation makes it easy to see a headache as just that—pain in the head. However, if we recognize that there is an inherent interconnection, both within us and within the wider world, we then have the opportunity to understand and address the deeper causes of symptoms.

Just as an acupuncturist or Chinese herbalist asks questions when seeking to treat the causes of a headache, there are essential questions that needed to be asked about what caused the river below our office to start to flood the parking lot. As is well documented, climate change is leading to an increase in storms, floods, and other severe weather around the world. These are not theoretical issues that might happen at some point in the future—the realities of climate change are happening here and now.

But instead of merely looking at the effects of climate change, the perspective of Chinese medicine asks us to try to understand where this change is coming from. If we think of severe weather as a symptom, we can then ask a question of real importance: What is the symptom of climate change trying to tell us?

The typical approach, however, to our increasingly dramatic weather is to examine the science of what is occurring and the public policy issues related to the crisis. We often hear about the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, the subsidization of the fossil fuel industry, and the corporate greed that impacts environmental policies. Understanding the science and policies of climate change is undoubtedly important. Though the policies are very real and very significant, they are also symptoms of deeper issues. Our assumptions are some of the deeper causes of the climate crisis—things like how we see the world, what we value, how we define success, and the stories we choose to tell and listen to.

Additionally, the science and policies are based on the assumption that climate change is happening outside us. The research is clear that we are living on a planet that is warming and destabilizing, resulting in more torrential rains and floods like what we experienced in Vermont. Looking at what is happening through the lens of Chinese medicine, however, we can also see that what is occurring in the climate is occurring within us. In other words, the warming and destabilization of the climate mirrors our own personal imbalances, as well as the imbalances in our country and our culture. Just as the planet is rapidly warming and destabilizing, we as individuals are dramatically and unsustainably overstimulated. And just as the climate’s ability to hold greenhouse gases has been compromised, our own internal peace has also been compromised. Here in the United States, our individual overemphasis on newness, having more, and doing more is a reflection of what is happening with the climate on a global scale.

All symptoms potentially have a cure. In the face of the floods in Vermont and similar severe weather globally that now confronts us, an important question arises: What is the remedy for the sickness of climate change? But before we can begin to answer that question, we need to understand what is causing the sickness itself. Symptoms of all kinds and on all scales appear because things are out of balance. Even a symptom that is as severe and wide-reaching as climate change has a set of remedies that can address it through treating its underlying causes. If we do take this approach, as happens with individuals who receive acupuncture treatments and take herbal medicine, not only is it possible for the symptom of climate change itself to be treated, but a deep sense of well-being can emerge within the country and the culture that is responsible for having created the crisis.

The Little Picture and the Big Picture: The Microcosm and Macrocosm

A middle-aged woman arrived at our clinic after calling for an appointment earlier that week. I asked what had brought her in, and she began to describe symptoms that have become synonymous in America with women and aging—hot flashes that wake her at night. She also described a generally shallow and restless sleep, persistent low-grade anxiety, high-pitched ringing in her ears, and occasional severe, debilitating headaches.

After about forty-five minutes of questions about her life and health, I requested that she lie face-up on the treatment table. Standing next to the table and facing her, I took her left hand in my left hand, palms facing each other. I positioned my right index finger just below where her wrist bends, on the thumb side, and then my right middle finger and ring finger below that. I repeated the process on her right side. My fingers were placed just above where blood flows in her arteries, and I focused my attention for a few minutes on each side, applying light pressure. While doing so, I listened for information even more subtle than the number of heartbeats per minute, namely the condition of what Chinese medicine calls Qi. Rather than listen to the pulse of the blood, I listened to the Qi’s pulses of the twelve organs, six on each wrist.

Chinese medicine’s long history—which has only recently been introduced to the West—has produced many different translations of the meaning of Qi. A scholarly and literal translation is “the finest influence of matter,”2 while a more general understanding is “Qi governs the shape and activity of the body and its process of forming and organizing itself.”3 Regardless of the particular definition used, pulse diagnoses can tell us the condition of a person’s health and their internal organs by listening to the amount and the quality of Qi that is moving along the surface of the wrist at different locations.

After listening to the different pulses, I asked Jenny (whose name I have changed to protect her identity) to stick out her tongue several times. Unlike in Western medical clinics, where patients open their mouths so doctors can examine the back of their throats, in Chinese medicine we can understand the condition of the internal organs based on the condition of the tongue. As we’ll discuss later, the size, shape and color of our tongue tells us what’s happening internally.

Through several thousand years of continuous refinement, Chinese medicine has developed diagnostic methods that enable the practitioner to understand what is happening inside the body by assessing what is happening externally. Based on several millennia of understanding is the recognition that the small picture—for example, the microcosm of Jenny’s tongue and the Qi in one part of her wrist—is a reflection of the big picture—her overall macrocosm of health. These diagnostic methods are tools that allow us to deeply understand people’s internal conditions as well as a concrete example of Chinese medicine’s larger philosophical approach. If we view the world and our lives through the lens of separation, Chinese medical diagnosis might seem like an outdated superstition, giving rise to the skeptic’s question: How can placing your fingers on someone’s wrist and looking at their tongue tell you anything about what is happening in the body?

The answer comes from understanding the interconnection that is embedded within Chinese medicine. Rather than seeing the world through a lens of isolation and separation, as does Western medicine, Chinese medicine views the world with a perspective of connection. From this holistic vantage point, the nature of something can be seen if we look at it in great detail or from the panoramic view. Some of us in the West have come to believe that we are individual islands unto ourselves—that we are separate not only from the people around us but from the world in general. Similarly, we might view our organs as separate entities and our body as separate from our mind and emotions. But the older—and in my view, more developed and insightful—Chinese medicinal perspective is based on a different set of assumptions: one central understanding is that everything is indeed connected.

Equally important, this timeworn medical tradition is comfortable with inductive thinking, where we look for patterns and connections rather than the more common Western perspective that looks for absolute truth. Chinese medicine assumes that the microcosm and macrocosm reflect the same conditions and tendencies, with the only significant difference being scale. This is similar to the modern concept of the hologram, in which we can look at the whole image and see the picture clearly, or focus on a small piece of the image and again see the whole picture. In other words, the small picture and the big picture are, in fact, the same picture. The only real difference is one of scale.

The historical texts that serve as the basis for the study and practice of Chinese medicine have this assumption of interconnection and this holistic perspective woven within them. While some of Western medicine is now trying to include this interconnectedness and bigger picture view, Chinese medicine has already had this infused into its thinking, writing, and practice for several thousand years. For example, the Nei Jing, or Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine, written several thousand years ago, describes how weather can promote health or sickness.4 Though not often stated explicitly because it is assumed throughout the text, there is also an inherent understanding that we are not only connected to nature in general but also to the seasons. The Yellow Emperor’s Classic states clearly that we as humans are a reflection of the universe as a whole. One translation of the text reads, a “human being is a small universe as the human body has everything that the universe has.”5

Two other seminal Chinese medicine texts that are still prominently used in teaching and practice have a similar understanding of our connection to the natural world. The Shang Han Lun, published approximately 1,800 years ago, presents the viewpoint of the “School of Cold.” In this tradition, cold weather can affect our health if our immunity is weakened, allowing cold to move deeper into the body and cause numerous internal conditions.6 From a more Western biomedical perspective, the Shang Han Lun describes the progression of viral infections and their corresponding diagnostic and treatment principles.

The Wen Bing Xue provides the perspective of the “School of Heat,” which states that all sickness begins with excess warmth. Again, from a more modern medical view, this text describes the progression of bacterial infections and associated diagnosis and treatment.7 According to the Wen Bing Xue, heat can originate from environmental influences, and if not addressed, can travel deeper into the body and cause long-term chronic conditions. Both the School of Cold and the School of Heat understand that we are connected to the world around us and that what occurs in nature affects us, steering us toward health or sickness.

In addition to these and other foundational texts of Chinese medicine that articulate a perspective of interconnection, the practice of the medicine itself also speaks to its holographic understanding. In recognizing that the big picture and small picture are mirror images of each other, Chinese medical practitioners have used pulse and tongue diagnosis for millennia. It makes sense that we are able to understand the condition of our internal organs by placing our fingers lightly on the skin because the small picture—the Qi as it rises to the surface of the wrist—is a reflection of the larger picture—the condition of the internal organs. The same is true for understanding the condition of our organs by looking at the tongue, as it represents externally what is happening internally. In particular, the tip of the tongue corresponds to the organs in the chest, the middle of the tongue to the organs in the abdomen and the back of the tongue to the organs in the lower torso.

Similar to the relationship between the tongue and the internal organs, acupuncturists can insert small, extremely thin pin-like needles shallowly below the surface of the skin not only to affect the organs located much deeper in the body, but also to treat the mind and emotions. Even the Chinese medicinal conception of “organ” has holistic connotations. When Chinese medicine speaks about particular organs, they have both physical functions—often similar to more modern Western understandings—as well as emotional and spiritual characteristics.

For instance, in the Yellow Emperor’s Classic, the Lungs are responsible for taking in oxygen on a physical level, as we understand in Western medicine, and they are also connected to the emotion of grief and our connection to the divine. As in Western medicine, the Liver is understood to filter the blood but also to be related to the expression of anger and our bigger vision of who we are. In addition to pumping blood, the Heart is also about the emotions of joy and love. It’s also understood to be responsible for expressing who we are in the world, similar to the Western idea of it being important to be true to your heart.8 When Chinese medicine refers to different organs, both their physical function and their mental and spiritual aspects are addressed.

Looking back at Jenny’s condition, it was clear that both her pulses and her tongue were telling a similar story. Her internal condition was similar to that of many of us in the West—she had too much heat and not enough coolant. While this diagnosis can have numerous causes, it was clear from speaking to Jenny that a major part of her condition was from being too busy for too long. In her well-intended effort to be a productive employee, caring community member, loving mother and spouse, and to exercise regularly, Jenny had simply been too active physically and mentally for too many years. Whether we are taking a walk, talking to a coworker, or reading a book, we are using our Qi to do these things. This energy by its nature is warming, and when it has been overused for an extended period of time, it creates what Chinese medicine calls heat.

Heat is an excess of warmth and a state of overstimulation, which can eventually cause our internal fluids, or coolant, to evaporate, as when we leave a pot of water boiling on the stove. An excess of warmth and reduced internal fluids are called Yin-deficient heat, where the internal temperature not only increases but also the internal coolant decreases, like evaporating water. This creates a cycle where a loss of coolant increases the heat, which causes more coolant to evaporate, further increasing the heat.9

Yin and Yang, in Us and in the Climate

The concept of Yin and Yang are among the oldest and most developed existing medical understandings. Yin in nature corresponds with cold temperatures, the winter season, moisture such as rain and humidity, and night. Yang corresponds to warmth, summer, dryness, and day. Yin is also associated with water, and Yang with fire. As in the Yin-Yang circle, Yin is represented by black and Yang is represented by white. Similar to how they are seen in nature, Yin and Yang are fundamental influences within us—Yin is stillness, rest, and inactivity; Yang is movement, doing, and activity.10

Jenny’s tongue and pulse indicated an excess of heat and a lack of coolant, particularly within her Kidney. Her tongue was red all over, and had a deep crack from front to back. The redness can be understood as the type of heat similar to a fire that is burning too brightly. The crack appears from Jenny drying out internally, as would soil exposed to a baking summer sun without any rain. The quality of Jenny’s Qi was also dried out and hot. Her pulse was thin, indicating that her fluids were no longer full and were instead evaporating, and there was also a quality of excess force. Rather than being strong, the pulse felt as if it were agitated, pushing up quickly and abruptly against her skin. This indicates excess heat and feels as if the energy is trying to push its way up and out.

Jenny’s individual condition bears a striking similarity to what climatologists are describing is happening to the planet. As has been exhaustively documented by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and widely discussed in several popular books, our planet is rapidly getting warmer. In 2007, the IPCC issued its exhaustive fourth assessment report, summarizing published Western scientific data on the condition of the planet’s climate. Along with Al Gore, it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in December of that year for assembling and analyzing the work of more than 2,500 scientific expert reviewers, with over 800 contributing authors and more than 450 lead authors from over 130 countries. To summarize the report’s findings, there is a nearly universal scientific consensus that the planet is warming significantly and rapidly as a result of human actions. It is likely this will continue to contribute to more violent storms, dramatic melting of glaciers, increased floods and droughts, and general disruption of climate stability.

The report clearly states at the beginning of its summary that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increase in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.”11

The vast amount of data collected globally, featured in the IPCC report and also in more recent research, indicates there is no real doubt for Western scientists about what is happening. Recently, it has also become clearer to the scientific community that the ability of the planet to keep cool and stable and keep greenhouse gases at bay is decreasing. There are several interrelated reasons for this, including the acidification of the oceans, thawing of permafrost, melting of ice sheets and glaciers, and deforestation. From the perspective of Chinese medicine, the planet is clearly experiencing excess heat on a global scale. As the research and data indicates, this increase in heat is occurring at the same time as the planet’s ability to maintain coolness and climate stability diminishes. By overlaying a Chinese medical perspective onto this global issue, we can see that Western climate data indicates the planet is suffering from Yin-deficient heat.

Though the discussion surrounding the climate’s dramatic changes might seem alarming coming from the often conservative Western scientific community, it has been twenty-five years since the first well-publicized, outspoken calls of public warning. With its publication in 1989, Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature presented what was, at that time, the best available Western scientific understanding about what was happening to the climate, as well as different possible future climate scenarios. While it could be argued that there was not scientific consensus on climate change back then, there was certainly more than ample evidence to indicate serious issues were present that could create dramatic global consequences.

The year prior, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and preeminent scientist James Hansen testified before the U.S. Congress that human activity was affecting the climate globally. As far back as 1988 he was saying that “I declared, with ninety-nine percent confidence, that it was time to stop waffling: Earth was being affected by human-made greenhouse gases, and the planet had entered a period of long-term warming.” According to Hansen, with this warming comes an increase in global instability—heavier rains, more extreme flooding, and more intense storms.12

The situation of our global climate did not just appear magically overnight. As climate research indicates, it also does not resemble natural cyclical climate variations. Instead, it is the result of our individual and collective actions and inactions. It’s also the result of the actions and inactions of our larger institutions, most notably in the United States and the Western industrialized world in general. Just like Jenny, we as a country and a culture have been too busy for too long, and many of the systems we have created have dramatically magnified this imbalance.

Once we recognize that climate change is the result of this imbalance, it is of vital importance to look below the surface of the condition, as a deeper diagnosis provides us the opportunity to treat where the symptom is coming from. By understanding both the multiple branches of the condition—the rising temperatures, decreasing forests, saturated oceans, thawing permafrost, and melting ice sheets and glaciers—and their underlying root causes, it’s possible we can self-administer the medicine we need to address this sickness. Given the severity of this situation, now is the time to understand and treat the root causes of the crisis. By translating Western climate science to Chinese medicine, the severity of the situation indicates an urgent need to understand climate change as a symptom of bigger and deeper issues, within us, our country, and our culture.