I Want to Make America Healthy Again, Too

I COULD FIT right in with crunchy “MAHA” moms.

I wore my babies in patterned baby carriers, puréed organic squash and bananas for their first foods, and obsessed over toxins and microplastics in everything. I daydream about backyard chickens and growing enough tomatoes and cucumbers to last through the winter storedin neat rows of mason jars in my pantry. I, too, want cleaner water, soil, air, and food for my children.

The “Make America Healthy Again” movement is a strange “horseshoe alliance” of far-right and far-left hippies, homesteaders, vaccine skeptics — maybe even some who make their own granola. At its heart is a growing mistrust in the scientific establishment and a shrinking definition of health — from something we work toward together as a society to something we defend and purchase for ourselves and our families.

As a person with resources, I feel the easy draw of that narrowed mentality. If the air or water is polluted, I can buy fancy purifiers. If the soil is contaminated, I can pay to haul in garden dirt or move to land farther from polluting sources. But there are fewer and fewer places to go to avoid wildfire smoke, hurricane damage, or toxic emissions. Seeking my children’s health requires more than individualistic self-protection. It requires seeking the health of all people and the entire planet.