In more than 60 locations across Montana, colored triangular flags are flying at schools and community hubs.
Each color relates to a range of numbers associated with air quality on a scale designated by the Environmental Protection Agency. Green is “good.” Purple is “very unhealthy.” A deep maroon color was added a few years ago to indicate how bad air quality in the West has been due to wildfire smoke, according to Dr. Lori Byron.
Lori and her husband Dr. Robert Byron have been instrumental in planting these flags across the state, and worked in clinical medicine for over 35 years. They spent some of that time launching a community health center on the Crow Reservation in southcentral Montana, near Hardin where they used to live.
A decade ago, the couple had an epiphany: If humans don’t do something about climate change, what physicians do in exam rooms will be irrelevant. At the time, few health professionals in Montana were speaking up about the impacts climate change can have on human health, Robert said.
Extreme heat and unhealthy air leads to premature death and the displacement of people, which comes with ancillary physical and mental health effects. Air pollution is a leading cause of death worldwide, and in 2021 was linked to 15 percent of all global deaths in children under five years old, according to the State of Global Air, which reports air quality data from around the world.
The air quality flags are supported in part by an EPA program focused on the quality of the air we breathe. The EPA, along with Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality, supports an effort to fund PurpleAir monitors. These devices are cheaper and require less maintenance than the 25 official air quality monitors that populate the state’s Today’s Air map, allowing for more convenient dispersal.
Since air quality can shift dramatically depending on location, weather and geography, the Byrons say it’s important to widely distribute these sensors. This distribution provides the added benefit of bringing climate change rhetoric into more places, including the media, according to Robert, who says the words “climate change” can have the same effect on people as the word “cancer”: once they hear it, they often don’t hear much afterward.
“Hopefully that will normalize that conversation,” he said, “so people can say, ‘What do you think? What are we going to do about it?’”
The air quality flags, and six, 36-inch-wide banners — rotating between different hospitals or health centers across the state bearing messages of climate change’s impact on health and action to take— are an attempt to emphasize the connection between health and climate change in a way that doesn’t make a person shut down. The banners stay in a location for about a month before they circulate, and have been flown in Missoula, Bozeman, Billings, Big Sandy and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai health center.
Lori says these banners have sparked positive conversations among staff particularly, but also with patients. And the dialogue fits with how the Byrons end conversations connecting the changing climate with health-related issues.
“Climate change is the world’s greatest group participation project,” Robert said. “We can all win together. In fact, it’s the only way we will.”
Three Tips:
How do we make climate change easier to talk about?
- Tell personal stories and explain why climate change matters to you.
- Talk about specific issues that matter to your friends, family, partners, colleagues, etcetera, in a conversation.
- Listen to what the other person says.
