To Republican Senator William Frist, who began his career not in politics but medicine, taking on the climate crisis was a natural next step after stepping down as Tennessee Senator in 2007. “It comes back to the same thing: improving the well-being of people by focusing on their health,” says Frist, who joined the Senate in 1995 before serving as Senate Majority Leader from 2003 to 2007.
To this end, last year he partnered with the Nature Conservatory to establish the Senator Bill and Tracy Frist Initiative for Planetary and Human Health, which aims to bridge public health solutions and the climate crisis. Focusing on communicating the health impacts of climate change—which range from an increase in mental health crises to heightened risk of respiratory and cardiovascular disease—says Frist, is all about showing people that climate is not a partisan issue.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TIME: You began your career as a physician before turning to politics. What inspired you to turn your attention to the climate crisis?
Frist: I spent twenty years in medicine as a physician, and then as a heart and lung transplant surgeon, focusing on individuals and their health and their well being. And then for the next twelve years, I went to the policy arena in the United States Senate, where I did essentially the same thing, focusing on the health and well being of millions of people. In the last 15 years or so I have done the same thing in the climate arena, but now the audience is the planet.
You have called for climate change to be recognized as a public health crisis. Why is it important to reframe the way we look at climate change?
The human impact has been left out of the equation for too long. The best way to appeal to [people] is to start with how the changing climate will impact you and your children and generations to come. It's important now. It'll get increasingly important every day that goes by. I find that’s not disarming, but realistic, because that is why people are concerned.
You have written about the mental health impacts of climate change, especially following extreme weather events. How do we address these effects, especially as extreme weather events are increasing in frequency?
We have to look at mitigation in a way that we just haven’t in the past. The science is so clear now that hotter days affect mental health, whether it's diagnosable mental health, or it's the way we feel today. But until we bring together the mental health specialists who can talk to the policy makers, we're not going to see much change.
What are some of the ways we can use policy to address the public health impacts of climate change?
Individuals [need to] understand that by doing things locally, it can have an impact that affects policy at the state level and the global level. Having been a Senator, I've seen these successes and I recognize that it starts with the individual.
Climate change knows no state borders, pollution knows no state borders, unstable weather patterns knows no state borders. It's a planetary issue but our policy structures are set up through local, regional, state, federal and global. [If] you pay attention and you learn and you communicate, and you elect, and you vote, you can affect that policy at the state level and the federal level, and then at the global level as well.
And that's why I'm optimistic. By coming together, by framing both from a health perspective, starting with the individual, we can be successful here.
We are speaking after the Trump Administration has made major rollbacks on climate initiatives. How do we convince policymakers on the state and federal level to prioritize climate-forward policies?
I'm optimistic here as well, and it comes from experience addressing issues, like anti-smoking, which had a huge industry against any sort of progress, and HIV AIDS, which faced a lot of stigma. People say, “How can you be optimistic when you look at the last six weeks in executive order after executive order?” And there are basically two reasons. Number one is the people. If you talk to people today, I would say 70% say, “of course there is climate change, and there is climate change that is accelerating over my lifetime compared to it at any time.” The people are with us.
Number two is the science. [We know] there are more frequent and higher intensity of extreme weather events now than at any time in recorded history.
When you put those two together, ultimately, it's a matter of just bringing people to the table and communication. We have to make that connection. There's no question that we can address the changing climate and biodiversity laws, those two crises in a way that we've never been able to in the past.
What are some of the ways people can work together on climate action while the country feels so polarized?
I speak to individuals as I would a patient, and so I try to put myself in their situation. If I am talking to parents with children, I talk very directly about the impact that that [extreme] heat has on the ability of their child to learn in school, and that immediately establishes this relationship, because people want the best for their children.
If I'm talking to people in communities where safety is an issue, I point out to them things that they don't normally jump to if they're talking about climate change: on those hotter days, there is a higher incidence of crime, there's a higher incidence of firearm injury.
What I find is that by framing in terms of the impact [of climate change] on mental health or on physical health that people listen, they open up, and their next question is, ‘Why is that?’.
What has it been like to work on climate action as a Republican these days? Why is it important for both parties to prioritize the environment?
When I was in the Senate, the science wasn't as strong as it is today. But it hadn't really become the partisan issue that it became in the 2010s. People were working across the aisle on these big health issues that related to the environment. [When] I left in about 2006 … it became much more of a partisan issue. Once it became a partisan issue, it locked down the discussions we've had. It was a huge backward movement in many ways.
The Republicans, at the policy level, are not there, and so that's where the partisan [difference] actually lies. But having a Republican such as myself, who has had the highest elected office in the legislative branch of government, being majority leader of the United States Senate, feeling so passionately, who happens also to be a physician, hopefully we'll be able to rationally, reasonably open the door for people to listen to the science, listen to where the American people are, to break through that partisanship that is there today. Because things are getting worse.