May 2026
Trish McOrmond featured in The Narwhal's series on costs of fossil fuels
Trish McOrmond featured in The Narwhal's series on costs of fossil fuels
In April, environmental media outlet The Narwhal launched Who Pays?, a series investigating the intersections of the environment and the economy. The project is an enlightening, devastating, and important journalistic achievement. "A healthy economy requires a healthy environment. When we try to ignore that, somebody pays. Let’s take a look at who," the editors write in their series overview.
The first article is entitled, ‘In death and in debt’: how we pay for fossil fuels with our health. In it, journalist Carl Meyer explores the health-related costs -- borne by individuals, businesses, communities, institutions, taxpayers, and governments -- of Canada's reliance on fossil fuels. The costs are not only financial; we also pay with our physical and emotional health and well-being.
For insight into mental health-related costs, Meyer interviewed For Our Kids National Council member Trish McOrmond.
"There is a level of frustration, and almost like a compartmentalization,” [Trish] said — a defence mechanism people use to avoid confronting the stress of knowing they will have to deal with more climate-change consequences at their job. “It’s hard for them to open up and have those conversations, because they have to put it away.”
She said it’s a challenge to put a specific dollar figure on the mental-health impacts of evacuations or other climate-related personal emergencies, because they can appear years after specific events and seem disconnected.
“They’re not showing up by people saying, ‘Oh, I’m worried about climate change.’ It’s showing up as disengagement at work, it’s showing up as [fatigue and burnout]. It’s showing up as increased domestic violence and interpersonal violence,” McOrmond said.
“We don’t see the cost directly, because we don’t have a system that measures those costs. And since we don’t measure them, we don’t see them.”
Trish is quoted later in the article as well.
McOrmond, the sociologist, sees a glimmer of hope in the course she teaches on systems thinking, a way of examining the different components of why the world is set up the way it is and how decisions are made as a result. She says students bring excitement and enthusiasm to conversations “as they start to realize that there is another way of looking at this world that isn’t just about extraction.”
Some of the climate solutions related to health she points to are movements to source local ingredients and share food, community-supported agriculture in rural areas to help farmers get food to local markets, local community festivals, volunteer-run shops and food banks.
“We have to stop looking at the big things that are scaring us, and start looking at the small things that are saving us,” she said.
“The more local we are, the safer we are. I know that sounds contradictory, but once we’re safe locally, we can begin to make changes and we can move the needle on a bigger scale. We just have to know each other, and have to trust each other.”
Bravo, Trish, and kudos to Carl Meyer and the team at the Narwhal for this important work!
