Season 3, Episode 24: Alice

In the 77th episode of Climate Action Figures, host John Whidden welcomes Alice, a Switzerland-based veterinarian who no longer practices clinically and instead works toward One Health through policy and research. Alice explains that veterinary careers extend beyond treating animals into areas like food safety, prevention, research, and education, and describes moving from clinical work in Italy to policy work in Brussels via a veterinary trade association, then to research in Switzerland to build expertise for future policymaking. She outlines One Health as the interdependence of human, animal, and environmental health, citing food systems and climate-driven shifts in vector-borne diseases as examples, and argues that healthy humans depend on healthy environments and animals. Alice compares sustainability in Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland, shares her climate action of saving surplus perishable food through local initiatives, and says hope comes from connecting with committed advocates like Harshita.

00:00 Welcome to Episode 77

00:32 QuickFix Mailbox Hack

00:55 Meet Alice in Switzerland

03:22 Vet Without Patients

04:29 Finding One Health

07:41 Breaking Into Policy

09:38 One Health in Action

12:49 Moving for Sustainability

15:36 Harshita and Youth Advocacy

17:15 Food Saving Climate Action

19:23 Hope and Closing

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Transcript

Alice 0:02

Climate Action Figures.

John 0:13

Hello, and welcome to the 77th edition of Climate Action Figures. My name is John Whidden, and this week on the show you get to meet Alice. Why the emphasis on 77? It just seems like a cool number. First, this week's QuickFix and Bernadette points out that in most areas, if you tape a little note inside your mailbox that says something like, "no flyers, please", you will have a lot less garbage or better yet recycling to deal with. So thanks for that Reminder, Bernadette, and welcome Alice.

Alice 0:54

Hi everyone.

John 0:55

Now you're in Switzerland, right?

Alice 0:58

Indeed.

John 0:58

So do you get flyers in your mailbox like we do in North America?

Alice 1:03

This comes pretty on point as today, coming home, I checked. I was surprised to find quite a pile, so thank you, Bernadette.

John 1:10

Alice, we were connected by Harshita and it is amazing how many times I have repeated those words: we were connected by Harshita. You probably won't be surprised because she is so connected to so many amazing people. I think we're gonna actually have to start paying Harshita a guest-finding fee. She tells us that you are a veterinarian by trade. Is there a specific animal you work with more than any other?

Alice 1:34

That's a really funny question as it's a very common one too. I think it's the first thing someone asks when they're talking to a vet and interacting with a vet. As we do generally assume that a veterinarian is gonna be a clinician. And that's just a common image we have of vets that are gonna be doctors and they're gonna just be treating their patients, which are non-humans. I'm currently not working as a clinician even though I'm very much a veterinarian and very much involved in veterinary matters, but there are no animals in my life at all at the moment. So no one would be my answer. A surprising one.

John 2:10

Okay, let's get further into that in just a second, but clearly you will be a veterinarian because you love animals. So is it, uh, difficult for you to be away from animals? Do you love being with animals?

Alice 2:23

Oh, absolutely. So I did change a path in my veterinary career a couple times already. I did start as a clinician. It is kind of the most natural way to start working after one graduates. I was so used to spending 60 hours a week with animals that when I stopped, as I moved and I changed career, it was quite literally like being on withdrawal. Like animals were my addiction and I moved. I could not have a pet with me at the time, and so I just started pet sitting and dog walking just to kind of scratch that itch quite literally. So, absolutely. Uh, animals are still very important to me. They're just not my job in the way people assume they are.

John 3:04

we can't let this thread go without asking you: do you have favorite animals?

Alice 3:08

As a child, I always answer the Black Panther. I'm not sure why, but I'm quite dog obsessed. That is yes. I, my, my attention span is absolutely inexistent when there's dogs around.

John 3:19

Black Panthers and dogs: very good. So Alice, what does it mean exactly to be a veterinarian who is not a practitioner?

Alice 3:27

This is something I'm really glad we're touching on. It's something I feel very passionate about because in the general idea of what a vet is. It is so closely connected to being this doctor for animals, and there is so much more in this profession going from food safety to research, to medicines, to preventive health to education. Like There is so much more than, uh, just working with animals. And of course then such a wide array of animals in that too. And so in my case specifically, I left clinical practice to actually work in policy. Something I absolutely never imagined myself as I was studying because I was never led to imagine myself in those shoes or trained to do that. And now I'm kind of training myself to have more expertise to be able to do policy. So right now I'm doing research actually, so that's why there's no animals in my life. But I'm very much doing research that is connected to animal health. But not just animal health.

John 4:29

Now we'll come back to the research in just a moment, but, uh, what inspired you to move more from that clinical world to the research side of veterinary medicine?

Alice 4:39

The research side and the policy side are very much connected as there is a common goal there that I felt that I couldn't achieve by just being a, a practitioner. And that is, I, I kind of have a drive. To have a bigger impact than just my one patient and my one client. I'm here also today because I really, really care about the environment and climate and sustainability, and I was trying to find a way. To connect what I was trained to do and my background with this very strong passion. And at one point in like the very last years of my studies, I discovered One Health. And One Health is an approach to global health challenges where people that are trying to look at solutions are considering, with the same weight. Animal, human and environmental health as these are very tightly connected in some important challenges. And for long-term vision and solutions, we need to imbue all three and consider them together. Otherwise, our solutions are gonna be very shortsighted and not actually solutions. And so once I got to this and I was like, okay, that's what I want to do, but how do you do that? Like, who are you to do that? I saw. These two potential paths. To this day, I don't know if maybe there were a million more, but I would say that there were two paths in front of me to be a one health specialist, and that was to either do research, so someone that really finds the knowledge and the evidence that can support solutions to resolve large issues like global pandemics and antimicrobial resistance and food insecurity and food safety, all these very large things. And I could do that, or I could be on the other side in the policymaking side as part of the large team of people that take this knowledge and tries to translate it into the regulations that ensure that knowledge, that evidence is driving the solutions is actually being implemented. At first, I saw the research side as very frustrating. 'Cause the way I see it, I think we have the solutions, we have the knowledge. But it's very tricky to make them become reality in the politics. So I thought I would be frustrated as a researcher and let me try policy first, and I went into policy. But I felt that again, I was just a very young vet with no real life experience, with not a big expertise in anything. So who am I to advocate on anything that is meaningful? And so that's why I took a step back and I was like, okay, let me actually know what I want to be talking about. Let me know where we should be focusing on, let me know where I would like to direct the public attention. The general public and of course policymakers before I go back into that policy space. So the two are really tightly connected. They're working together towards my goal. but I had to take a step and try to see how that was going to work for me, as I have to say, all my colleagues, all my friends do not understand what I'm doing, so I kind of had to find this path and make it work for me. And so there's a bit of trial and error,

John 7:41

and It seems like it would be pretty daunting: practical veterinary medicine, it's very complicated, but it's also very straightforward in terms of, here is my job, here's what I need to heal.

Alice 7:51

Exactly.

John 7:53

But this seems like it would be daunting to get into this policy. Like, how do I approach policy? Do I connect with a certain organization? So what have been your inroads? How have you managed to do that? If someone was interested in this kind of a pursuit, would

Alice 8:08

Yeah, I think you really knocked the nail on the head in the sense that I had no idea how to do this and I don't think I have the technical skillset that is expected for someone who does this, because yes, I was trained to treat animals. I was trained to be on a farm or in a clinic, so I was suddenly in an office doing a completely different job. I was very fortunate to find an access point for me, and that was through the Trade Association of Vets. So I was doing policy for the vets. I was kind of representing the vets at a European level. And so that was the access point because I come from a vet background and they know that, and they want that even though I do not actually have the policy experience. So that was a great point for me, and I think this exists for different professions. maybe that's the way to start. If you weren't trained to be someone who imagines themselves in policy, but you have that technical expertise, it doesn't mean that it's not a space for you. You just need to find the right access point to build that, um, that training, that expertise that allows you to be in the room where it happens. That's how I like to phrase it. And so that's how it worked for me and I hope others can also find a way. It's not the paved path, but that doesn't mean it's not worth fighting through.

John 9:23

And you mentioned the intersection of these three areas, the environment, animals, and remind me of the third.

Alice 9:30

Humans,

John 9:31

Oh yeah. Right. How could I forget that?

Alice 9:33

no one forgets humans. I love that you did.

John 9:36

Yeah,

Alice 9:36

I love that.

John 9:38

So

Alice 9:39

really is.

John 9:40

areas, this Venn diagram, what have you found that is the overlap of all three of those that we might not realize that is really important?

Alice 9:48

The big overlapping point is health. So the health of the three is so deeply interdependent and connected. I find it very hard to divide the three but then we can look at more specific things that are quite close. So I think one very obvious example is food. So food nourishes all species, whether they're human or non-human. And then it comes from the environment. So poor environmental health, whether that is soil, whether that is water will affect how healthy we will be and how healthy our animals are, and not just our animals, wild animals. So I think that's a very obvious point where safe food and just available food for, so food security. we need to look at all three. We cannot expect, oh, humans will forever have safe food if we don't consider where we're growing this food. And so that's one I'm really passionate about. But in general with now climate change, so much of how diseases are appearing and spreading is changing because of how the climate is being affected. And it's not the same conditions we had before. And so, especially if you think of vector-borne diseases, so for example, in the Arctic, we have insects that had never been there before or that were there for a very short time, and now they have larger seasons and they're expanding and they're insects like mosquitoes and ticks that can potentially transmit diseases and they're accessing areas that were never ready for them. And so maybe don't even have plans to be prepared and to react and to mitigate the effect of disease. So the three are so deeply connected, we just need to kind of have this approach where we see that but I think the real problem there and why I advocate so much for it and believe so much in it, is that in general we do tend to be very anthropocentric. So we do tend to frame everything for a human advantage and not with this real trivalent point of view. Which is why it was so refreshing that you forgot the humans, and it's hard to, to push it back to that perspective when we're so used to just thinking of what our own benefit is.

John 12:00

So, considering that you've spent so much time in this area now really focused on this intersection between these three things, One Health, you boil it down to one piece of advice or one thing that you think people need to consider that we really aren't considering at this point in time?

Alice 12:20

It might sound very basic and not that innovative. But healthy humans depend on healthy environments and healthy animals. Full stop. If we even just think of the food point of view, it's that simple. We need to eat. It's really that simple. So we can be as self-centered and selfish as we wish. Even if we wanna walk down that path, we still need to absolutely prioritize animal health and environmental health.

John 12:49

Now Alice, before we started recording, you mentioned that you had recently moved to Switzerland, and we talked about that in the mail comment. It was that work related.

Alice 12:58

It's actually the second shift. So the practical career was happening in Italy and then I moved to Belgium. I was in Brussels, as everything that's regarding the European Union institutions is. So the policy work with the European, let's say, uh, framework is in Brussels, and then that move to research. So every time I change career, I also change a changed country. That's not necessary. That's how it worked out in my case. And so two months ago I moved to Switzerland to start a new job. And this new adventure and Journey.

John 13:33

as you moved from Italy to Belgium to Switzerland tell us a little bit about the different approaches to the environment; different awareness of climate between those three places.

Alice 13:45

I'm really glad you asked that question because living sustainably was a big reason for me to move. In Italy, I was really feeling like that was not entirely possible, at least for the way I imagined living sustainably. Which is very sad to say. So Italy has a lot of advantages and a lot of benefits, but you, you really are a car dependent. The recycling, the incentives to live in a sustainable life that tries to not waste is really hard. It's a quite a consumistic, I would say, society. And that was something I was really struggling with. And the move to Belgium was something that I knew would work well for me as it's a country where it's really easy to, to move around by train, by bike, it's so much more acceptable to buy secondhand in Belgium than it is in Italy. Whether it's clothes, whether it's, um, furniture, really anything. And that's something that is quite important to me. Some people laugh when I say this, but that is something that actually put me down a lot. It would affect me in my daily life and my happiness that I could live like this versus when I couldn't. And that is something that has kept going into Switzerland. So Switzerland is a notoriously very expensive country. But it really has a lot of initiatives for really recycling, and it's not even buying secondhand, it's just donating secondhand. So people move from this city so much that when they leave, they just, there's this telegram group where people just drop things and you just go pick them up and it's for free. So I'm currently furnishing my apartment. But for free, I'm not buying anything. And this would be impossible in Italy. So that was actually a really big driver. And the more I see that this is possible, the more it becomes important that I can keep living this way, because it's something that, for me is so important and also just gives me joy genuinely.

John 15:36

Now we haven't come back to Harshita and we probably should to give her full credit, but,

Alice 15:41

absolutely.

John 15:42

should ask how, you know Harshita, does she have a pet black panther or a dog you've worked with?

Alice 15:47

Oh, I would love if she had a pet, black panther. I think it would suit her so well. No, I'm kidding. But Harshita and I actually met in our youth advocacy efforts, so we met at an event in the context of the UNFCCC. So that's the UN organization that works, uh, on climate change. It's also the organization that, um, supports COP every year. And so we were at the session and we met, and in general, these climate spaces are not very often populated by people in health. So even though she's a human health specialist and I'm an animal health specialist there's a lot of kindredness there. Very quickly, we, we bonded over that, we became friends, so not just, you know, colleagues in the advocacy space. We met again at COP. And so she's an excellent speaker and she does so much amazing work in bringing attention to topics and issues that I think are so fundamentally important. And so I think that's something that has made us very, very close. And it's so important to have someone to, to know you're not doing this alone. So that's something I think, I don't know if she would answer the same way. I would hope so. But she's just a very inspirational human being and once you find that, and it's mutual. It's very special. And so I'm very grateful that she connected us and that we can reflect on her impact right now.

John 17:15

Tell us what you've chosen today to share for your climate action.

Alice 17:18

It's something that I have been able to do in Belgium and in Switzerland and not in Italy. So going back to what I said previously is that I, for almost all perishable foods, I don't buy them, but I save them. And so what I've started doing is when I moved to a new country or a new city, I look for food saving, food repurposing, food sharing, whatever they may call it, initiatives. It's amazing because of course it's extremely sustainable. You try new things that maybe you otherwise wouldn't. You don't have to think too much about your grocery shopping and what you're gonna cook, and it's cheap. You're saving money and so depending on the case, and it's not too good to go, it's really picking up fresh ingredients that are still good, but usually it's surplus food. So I invite everyone listening, check if this is happening around you, besides too good to go check. If there are, um, NGOs that are collecting food from supermarkets that would be thrown out and putting it out at, on Wednesdays between four to six for someone to pick up. It's become part of my routine. It's something that I love and I keep sharing and people are always happy to start this too. And so it's also, it starts connections. It starts conversations. It makes people aware of how much food we waste, which is absolutely... here you can cue my picture with me speaking. And behind me I have like 121 million something food is wasted every year. it's absolutely mind boggling how we use all the resource sources for food and then we waste it. It's such a low hanging fruit and there are already initiatives that are trying to make sure this food is not wasted. So let's try to do that.

John 18:56

And I'll plug one, in North America, at least at our local grocery store here in town, there's an app you can get for your phone called Flash Food, and it connects you with food that is about to be thrown away. It's good only for a couple more days, and they keep it at a separate cooler by the

Alice 19:11

Amazing.

John 19:13

Ahead of time. It's usually half price or less, and then you just pick it up on your way out the door.

Alice 19:17

Yeah, there's so many,

John 19:20

as Alice says.

Alice 19:20

There's so many initiatives. Just need to find them.

John 19:23

What gives you hope, Alice.

Alice 19:24

What gives me hope is that there are people like Harshita, like you, like me, that connect over this because they're so keen on making the world a better place, whether it's for climate, whether it's for health, whether it's for animals, but just they're trying to make, to leave an impact that is positive. And I think that as long as there's people like this that are reaching out and that they're connecting, which means they're also not losing hope themselves, I think there's so much power and potential for change in that. It is a bit of a easy response to say people. But there's so many things that are depressing that then when you, when you find people that really believe and put their efforts in making a change, I think that's the most hopeful, thing I can imagine.

John 20:11

Well, I'm glad you shared that because I forgot humans earlier, so there we go. Thanks so much for connecting with us today, Alice.

Alice 20:18

Thank you. And thank you everyone listening, and yeah, just strive to make an impact every day.

John 20:25

Great advice and thank you viewer or listener for joining us today. If you like what you've heard here today, I invite you to pause for a moment, actually pause the podcast for a moment and think above someone who would benefit from hearing these wise words from amazing Alice today. Now you're back. Send them a link and invite them to join the conversation. We will be back again next week, same time, same place to hear from another climate action figure. Until then,

Alice 20:56

Go Figures!