Author of
The Coyote and the cottonwood
About Wendy
As a family practice physician, environmentalist and longtime community activist, my life experiences have combined to make me uniquely positioned to write THE COYOTE AND THE COTTONWOOD. Although I grew up along the Rust Belt—Buffalo, Cleveland and Toledo—my family always lived near parks and had large gardens. Every summer we’d take an extensive camping vacation. A touchstone of my childhood was my Italian grandparents’ house in Buffalo. There I would watch the raucous family dinners, the extended community where neighbors and relatives would drop in several times a day, the lovingly prepared meals using recipes passed down generations, the meticulously cultivated garden.
Later, as an adult, I moved to the Near West Side of Cleveland where I saw another example of “beloved community.” The neighborhood was home to urban pioneers dedicated to very different ideas than modern gentrifiers. They established a Catholic Worker House, a large community garden in a vacant lot years before this became trendy and sanctuary safe houses for immigrants fleeing violence in Central America during the 1980s. All of these formative experiences led me to see the importance of community and connection to the natural world to our collective health.
My path to medicine was an odd one. I started college pre-med but veered into politics after a bad grade in chemistry. Upon graduation, I worked for an environmental organization coordinating the 20th anniversary of Earth Day in Ohio and then in the state legislature. After a short time, I observed that most of the people in politics had very little “real world” experience. I decided that if I wanted to be a better policy maker, I needed to hear peoples’ stories to understand how the system was failing them and how to best improve it. Medicine seemed a great vantage point for that listening project.
As a doctor, I’ve had the great privilege to hear the stories of thousands of people from the homeless in Columbus, Ohio; Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico; Guatemalan immigrants on the west side of Cleveland; Chitewe people in Mozambique; labor activists in Chile; and rural Hispanic New Mexicans. I’ve worked to scale up HIV treatment in Mozambique, address high infant mortality rates in Cleveland as medical director of the city health department, and, in my current job, ensure that all Santa Feans have access to health care. The common thread? Those with deep connections to place and community are more resilient and healthier. When those connections are eroded, people suffer.
As an advocate, I’ve testified, marched, organized and written op-eds, academic papers and book chapters—all variations on the themes of justice, equality and solidarity. Twice I’ve been invited to give local TEDx talks, one on the importance of solidarity in international aid work and another on the problem of stigma and criminalization of mothers who use drugs. These and other examples of my previous writing can be found here.
All of these unique experiences have led me to the conviction that a radical shift in the way we live is necessary to foster the relationships we require to thrive.
What I Write About
I write about public health, political issues that affect health, how human health is dependent upon the health of communities and the natural world, the intersections of social justice, health, human rights, and environmental issues
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What I Speak About
I have been invited by non-profit groups across the country to provide expertise and speak about local community issues and public health, I can also speak to conferences and groups about environmental and public health issues, including health policy, global health, and environmental/health justice.
A few years ago, I bought a house in a small, traditional agricultural village of mostly crumbling adobe homes tucked into a half-wild valley on the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The naturalist in me immediately fell in love with the place. Most nights, you can hear the coyotes’ howls echo down the arroyos. It seemed the perfect spot for this family practice physician who has always been as interested in healing our relationships with each other and the natural world as much as in
treating illness and stitching wounds. From the first days living here, I became viscerally aware of a symbiotic relationship
with this little patch of earth and my responsibility to contribute to the vibrant community of humans and other living things.
My new home proved an apt vantage point from which to write THE COYOTE AND THE COTTONWOOD. Part “collective-help,” part call-to-action, The book is aimed at raising our consciousness about the deep connection between our personal wellness and the health of our natural world. Through the lives of its inhabitants,
both human and non-human, my little village is a vivid illustration of the principles that will lead us to wellness in ourselves, our communities and our earth.
I wrote THE COYOTE AND THE COTTONWOOD because we are living at the breaking point. The connections that we require to be healthy are withering away. In the United States, life expectancies are falling, suicide rates are skyrocketing and we are in the midst of a global epidemic of depression and mental illness. Our relationship to the earth and to each other is broken, wounded, quite possibly terminally ill. In our attempts to conquer nature, we are destroying it and also destroying ourselves.
In the book, I paint a picture—based on evidence from public health, sociology, anthropology and human ecology, combined with ancient cultural wisdom—of how we should live if we are truly concerned with the well-being of ourselves and the other living beings on which we depend.
READ AN EXCERPT FROM THE COYOTE AND THE COTTONWOOD HERE
Imagine if we prioritized restoring well-being to our environment as much as we prioritize our individual wellness, if we saw the two things as one and the same.
It means learning that we are not more important than the coyote or the gopher or even the lowly microbe, that the world was not created solely for our comfort and exploitation. It means accepting that something we might see as a nuisance today could have benefits beyond our knowing.
We are nature. We owe our very existence to the natural world. If it is not healthy, we cannot be healthy.
Our future, and the future of the Earth as we know it, depends on learning this lesson profoundly and quickly.