Climate Change and Health

Wide-spread talks of climate change became a prominent discussion when I was a teenager. It was extremely politically charged and I was primarily surrounded by people who were critical (and uneducated) of the concept of "global warming". I was living in a small, predominantly white, Christian town in central California - people here felt that any mention of Climate Change was another means of government control where the government was intent on installing fear in the populace so they could increase taxes for issues that didn't exist.
The interesting thing is that I had previously grown up in a suburb of Los Angeles where people had very little interest in the environment and were primarily left-leafing. If I had lived in that environment by the time the political world had shifted into talks of climate change, I likely would have been less inclined to believe in the rhetoric of the left and environmental science simply because I had no exposure to nature or anything outside of big cities. Moving to this small town, where the effects of climate change could be seen first-hand and where I was surrounded by people who refused to see it, I became extremely interested in learning more about it. Rather, I became interested in human behavior surrounding climate change - why did people believe in something that they had no exposure to, and why did the people who had exposure not believe it at all? Would it have been a different outcome had the topic come up without being so politically charged? Is science really that easily ignored?
This eventually led me to become an archaeologist in the Mojave Desert, where my need to study human behavior has been wonderfully intertwined with my interest in securing safety measures for our resources. I make a living studying how climate change will continue to impact both cultural and natural resources and I make decisions that will keep them safe in the long-run.
To me, climate change is what allowed me to decide my future career. Climate change is what allowed me to decide my feelings on the political environment in America. Climate change is what opened my eyes to the world outside of my personal bubble, for both people in society and nature. Climate change is what has made me a strong proponent of environmental education. Climate change, and all of the people who choose to bury their head in the sand, has made me a fighter. For all of us.