The Voices section is a place for physicians, staff and community leaders to share their perspectives on all things healthcare. Ratan Milevoj is Vice President of Innovation, Marketing and Communications and Assistant Chief Strategy Officer at Valley Children’s Healthcare.
MADERA, Calif. – This Wednesday, as we mark Earth Day 2026, I find myself reflecting on an idea that has stayed with me for more than two decades. I am reminded of a book I read in an economics class, Gaia Connections: An Introduction to Ecology, Ethics and Economics by Alan S. Miller. The book’s core premise is simple: we cannot separate our economy or our ethics from the environment that sustains us. Miller suggests that everything, our health, resources and community are part of a single, living system.
At the time, it felt like an academic concept. Today, it feels like a responsibility we can no longer ignore.
Healing Beyond the Exam Room and Hospital Walls
In his writing, Alan Miller challenged the idea that nature is a backdrop to our lives. Instead, he argued it is the foundation of our well-being. In pediatric healthcare, that idea is not philosophical, it is clinical.
We often define healing by what happens inside hospital walls: diagnosis, treatment, outcome. But those walls are not boundaries. They are points along a much larger system, a continuum, that shapes health long before a child arrives and long after they leave.
That reality is reflected in Valley Children’s 2025 report, which showed a $1 billion economic impact in the Central Valley. But the more important point is this: we are not separate from the systems that shape health; we are part of them, including the environment itself.
That becomes visible in care every day. As air quality worsens across the Valley, we see it reflected in rising asthma-related visits among children in our care. These are not abstract environmental trends. They are children struggling to breathe in our exam rooms and emergency departments.
A child should be able to play outside without inhalers or worry.
When Infrastructure Becomes Health Strategy
This is where environmental responsibility moves from theory to practice.
There is a hard truth at the center of healthcare today: we cannot fully heal children if the systems surrounding care contribute to the conditions that make them sick.
At Valley Children’s, our campus renewable energy microgrid is one response to that reality. It is more than an infrastructure project. It is resilience, ensuring that care continues even during regional grid disruptions. It is stewardship, designed to reduce our carbon footprint by more than 50% over time. And it is financial responsibility, allowing savings to be reinvested into the nurses, physicians and technologies that care for children every day.
The solar installation itself is also designed in the shape of George the giraffe, our mascot, turning a symbol of childhood comfort into a visible expression of sustainability and care.
In this way, sustainability is not separate from healthcare delivery. It is part of it.
For 75 years, Valley Children’s has served families across the Central Valley. That history carries a responsibility: to think not only about the care we provide today, but about the conditions shaping children’s health tomorrow.
A Broader Definition of Care
There is also a quieter truth in this work. As Mary Oliver wrote in Messenger: “My work is loving the world… which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.” In healthcare, standing still is not easy. The pace is urgent, the stakes are high and the work is constant. But there is value in occasionally pausing long enough to see the systems we are part of, and the future we are helping shape.
Because caring for children does not end at the bedside. It extends into the air they breathe, the energy systems that power their hospitals and the environment they will inherit long after childhood.
Caring for children has always been the mission. On this Earth Day, it is also a reminder that caring for them means caring for the world they will live in.
