Kim Loo has been a medical doctor for 36 years, but she also practices “chicken diplomacy,” her highly specialized Field of Action for overcoming climate change.
“As a small kid all I wanted was chickens,” (or “chooks” as they call them in Australia). Once she was able to transform her backyard into a garden, including lots of fruit trees that also help keep things much cooler, she added chickens as an integral part of her backyard garden ecosystem, providing the fertilizer.
When she goes to parties and dinners she brings a bucket with her to put the food waste in to feed to her chickens. “I go to these really formal dinners and I walk around with this chook bucket. … It’s chook advocacy because it reminds people that food waste and the methane it produces is a significant contributor to climate change.”
In her climate action work, Dr. Loo also developed another subspecialty: “cooking diplomacy.” So how did she get into these two distinctive Fields of Action?
As Dr. Loo discusses in her recent Energy & Stuff interview, she was nurtured into climate leadership. Her parents are Buddhists, which led the family to live lightly on the Earth. Her dad was a civil engineer. Her mom (or “mum” in Australian) was a music teacher who became a social worker, which impacted how Dr. Loo viewed the world through a social justice lens.
Loo graduated with her MD in 1989 and started practicing medicine in a low-income, underdeveloped area where many of her patients were homeless with no one to help care for them as they recovered. To top it off, the area kept getting hotter. This drove home a basic lesson: where people live is a huge determinate in their health.
While her mum provided the social justice side, her dad’s civil engineering background may have influenced her interest in technology. She became an avid reader of Renew Economy, an up-to-the-minute source for all things related to creating a zero carbon economy. This led her to be one of the first in Australia to get a Tesla Powerwall for her home, and she fully electrified in 2016.
Where she lives is quite conservative politically. As she states in an oped in 2019: “People I have known and loved for years did not accept the science of climate change.”
Instead of retreating into a climate clique,
“I decided to embrace everyone regardless of their political views.
There were several things that were clear to me:
Everyone cares about the future of their children.
Everyone wants air and water that is not contaminated.
No one wants to have endless days of heat.
Everybody wants reliable, cheap, and secure energy.
Very few people, including politicians, were aware of the health implications of climate change.”
Her first step in creating change for the climate came in 2016 when, on her own initiative, she invited local politicians for tea and to tour her home and see how much money she was saving. Only one showed up.
“I discussed all the bullet points with her at an informal chat in my garden in front of my chicken house.”
This personal outreach led to an article in The Daily Telegraph that put her personal climate activism on the map.
Loo also inherited something else from her mum: a love of cooking. This led to another organizer innovation — cooking classes and climate-friendly kitchen tech demonstrations.
“When people can smell the food and you’re talking to them, I think it engages their brain to take on more information.”
As she said, “I’m standing on my mum’s shoulders when I’m doing the cooking stuff.” Her mum led classes in her home on Chinese cooking, and Loo has continued the tradition. But she’s added her own twist to this social recipe — fitting in her message points when the time is right.
This includes how her induction burners save money over gas and heat up your kitchen about 50% less to boot, which also saves $$ for not needing to run the AC as much.
She regularly has people to her home to do induction cooking demonstrations, and is also doing them around Australia. She’s even done one for restaurant chefs.
Dr. Loo started her climate activism by doing great things on her own. But she’s now involved with a whole plethora of climate-related groups. Here are just some of them: Doctors For The Environment Australia (Board Member), Citizens Climate Lobby Australia, Healthy Futures, Parents for Climate, and the Climate Council.
Loo’s climate activism is spurred by her being a medical doctor and concern for her current and future patients.
“More people will be sick and die if we don’t do something about adaptation and mitigation.”
Because air pollution, including wildfire smoke, impacts every organ in the body, and because heat impacts every organ system, Loo and other doctors have ensured that this is now a part of medical school training.
For Dr. Loo, this climate health lens itself is viewed through her mum’s social justice lens:
“The environmental determinants of health are clean air, clean water, healthy soils, a safe climate and a healthy ecosystem. Climate change impacts you from the point of conception, depending on where you live, on your home, your education, your work…with the impacts felt most by the vulnerable and disadvantaged.”
While her chook diplomacy and her cooking diplomacy are person-to-person retail, she works with organizations doing policy advocacy because she understands there must be systemic change:
“There is inertia in our political system. We need policies at a Federal level to give markets the ability to confidently invest. We need to support clean fuels: it’s the low hanging fruit. We need to transition our transport, electrify the transport system, make it easy for people to buy electric cars, encourage locally generated electricity. The key is leaving no-one behind. … If any of us are marginalised during this transition, we will not succeed.”
Leaving no one behind not only includes the less fortunate. It also includes those not yet convinced of the need for action.
“I continue to love my family and friends who are on the other side of the political divide. They are very slowly shifting. …
We need to use every strategy that we can.
Why not love and respect?”
Dr. Loo: “Why not love and respect?”
Finally, for Dr. Loo, her mum’s social justice glasses keep her focused on what our vision, purpose, and Major Goal are calling us to: to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.
That’s what those of us in The Climate Movement are about. Join us!
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