These women are trying to humanize the climate crisis

It was Labor Day in 2022 when Amy Dishion received the phone call that would change her life: Her husband had died of heat stroke.  

“My entire life just fell apart,” Dishion said. “I lost my best friend and the father of my child.”

They had moved to Phoenix for her husband Evan’s medical residency in neurology. Just a few months before, Dishion had given birth to their daughter, Chloe. 

Their life as a young family was falling into place until that fateful morning in September, when Evan, who was 32 at the time, set out to hike with a few of his friends. They started early in the morning, but they were unprepared for just how quickly it would heat up. Her husband eventually began to show signs of heat stroke before passing out. His friends left him under a tree while they went in search of cell service to call for help. 

In many ways, Dishion said, the tragedy was preventable. The friend group was hiking in extreme heat without enough water and didn’t turn around when they should have. But high temperatures are also a risk that is growing every summer due to the climate crisis, she noted. More and more people are unaware of the dangers of extreme weather even as it becomes more deadly with each passing year. This year Phoenix broke records for experiencing 113 days in a row over 100 degrees, surpassing the previous city record set in 1993 of 76 days. 

The heat didn’t just take Dishion’s husband. As a young mother, it also left her in a tough financial spot. She had planned to be a stay-at-home mom and had moved to support Evan. Suddenly she didn’t have an income and had to move back to her hometown of Salem, Oregon, to live with Evan’s family. 

“It feels like being displaced, right on top of losing somebody in a very preventable way,” she said.

Now she’s speaking out through an organization called Extreme Weather Survivors, which aims to raise awareness over the toll of climate change. She’s not the only person sharing her story. There’s Shauntá Floyd, from Houston, whose power went out for a week when Hurricane Beryl hit this July. Beryl was originally forecast as a tropical storm, but ended up making landfall in Texas as a Category 1 hurricane. Floyd spent a night in her sweltering home without any air conditioning before evacuating to a cousin’s house. Millions of people lost power in the storm. 

There’s also Rhiannan Ortiz, who is in the third trimester of her pregnancy and lives in Phoenix without air conditioning. She worries about her own health and the health of her baby; pregnant people are considered a vulnerable population for extreme heat, and studies have shown extreme heat has been correlated to a higher risk of preterm birth and low birth weight. 

Recently, Extreme Weather Survivors teamed up with two other organizations — Science Moms, a nonpartisan advocacy organization, and All Hands and Hearts, a disaster relief organization — for a new campaign called “Act of Man.” Ortiz is among five other climate survivors in the campaign calling attention to what they refer to as “unnatural disasters.” 

Their aim is to make clear the connection between climate change and the escalation in disasters aren’t “an act of God” or something outside of human control, but are increasingly being attributed to human-caused global warming due to the burning of fossil fuels. 

“We want to just flat out say it, that unnatural disasters and extreme weather are an act of man, an act of us. And that the unnatural disasters are growing in severity and in devastation as a result of fossil fuel burning and pollution, and are impacting everyone we know,” said Science Moms cofounder Joellen Russell, an oceanographer and professor at the University of Arizona.

The campaign is airing advertisements featuring people impacted by climate disasters across social media, as well as on broadcast television, streaming services and other digital platforms like YouTube and TikTok. It’s all part of a messaging strategy that has been spearheaded by Potential Energy Coalition, a marketing company that is focused on getting more people to care about climate change. Suburban women are a large focus area. Science Moms was created as one way to reach them. 

The company conducts its own focus groups and collaborates with Yale Program on Climate Change Communication to gain insight on campaign strategies. It found that moms with politically moderate views were a key group that could take action on the climate crisis if they understood the urgency.  

“The research says that women are more persuadable than our fabulous husbands and brothers and friends … [who] once they’ve made up their minds that they’re on team anti-climate, it’s really hard to get them to change their minds,” Russell said. “On the other hand, women do tend to change their minds when they need to.”

Potential Energy found that they could accomplish this goal by focusing the messaging on “unnatural disasters.” According to a report they released in June, they found the term increased support for climate action by suburban women by 8.8 percentage points overall. For Democratic women, that number is even higher at 10 percentage points. For Republican women, it increased support by 7 percentage points. 

Potential Energy has also found that focusing on individual experiences also helps increase support for climate action. It’s why women like Floyd, with Extreme Weather Survivors, share their stories. 

“The narrative in Texas is that climate change doesn’t exist,” Floyd said. She aims to raise awareness about the connections between climate and carbon emissions, particularly in a fossil-fuel loving state. “It’s a global issue, and it needs to be highlighted so that we can reduce our carbon footprint and make changes to balance out what has already occurred.” 

Dishion, who spoke at New York Climate Week on Wednesday along with Floyd, said apart from being able to educate others on how to prevent deaths like her husband’s, she’s also motivated by the prospect of protecting her child’s future. 

“I want a safe world for my baby and all of our babies and all of our kids that have, through no fault of their own, inherited a giant problem,” she said. “I want the world to be habitable for the people growing up on this planet.” 

It’s stories like Dishion’s that can potentially cross the political divide on the topic of climate change. And a strategy that other groups like Moms Clean Air Force or Moms Demand Action have also honed in on — motherhood as an organizing force that can deliver a more nonpartisan message by focusing on the health and safety of children.

“Moms are the sort of way where we thought we could link arms with the rest of our sisters in the trenches raising kids and working at those kitchen tables on homework problem sets and paying our bills, to also think about what we can do to make our families safer now and safer in the future,” Russell said. 

“I think, really, the goal is that this conversation should be as American as apple pie,” she continued. “It’s not political. It’s about all of us.”