Every Breath You Take
Air Pollution is NOT Yesterday's Problem
🔥 An environmental historian has suggested that we live in the Pyrocene.
Our civilization, modern and sophisticated as we like to think we are, still runs on the fires we use for our purposes. Fire is contained, largely, in the engines of our economy.
Fire powers our transpiration by train, road and air. Fire heats our homes (directly or upstream at the utility's burners). And fires and their resultant smoke choke drought-striken western states increasingly every year as insect-and-disease-ravaged forests dry out and burn their millions of acres.
In the conflagration of the Pyrocene, everything we burn, we breathe. And these airborne particles and vapors exact an insidious and largely ignored and massive cost well beyond the scorched California ghost towns and headline-grabbing killer-smog events in India and China.
We recoil in horror from the possibility that a thousand people will die in our state in a given month from Covid strain du jour, alpha to omega. But we ignore the fact that the air we breathe kills multiples of those numbers as a persistent plague, all year long over a span of decades, while virus epidemics get the headlines and a quick response.
The alarming health-facts about the poisoned air we breathe are publicly available, but we choose not to look. Air pollution is so yesterday.
After all, we have global warming to worry about. But if you check the IPCC worst-case-scenario for our warming future in 2050, air-borne illness and death numbers are more alarmingly lethal that even that. And it is happening now, not in our children's future but in pregnant mother’s womb near you today.
And you might not be aware that air pollution does not just damage the lungs, but has a much greater than previously realized impact on the brain and mental health.
RESOURCES
►If you only read one fact-filled article (a long one) go here: David Wallace-Wells · Ten Million a Year: Dying to Breathe · LRB 2 December 2021
The EHN (Environmental Health Network) is a good source for information. Here are a few relevant links, should one or two readers be interested.
One important measure of air quality is small particles, expressed as PM2.5. EHN search results for articles including data on PM2.5
Pollution’s mental toll: How air, water and climate pollution shape our mental health
This is the first I have read about mental health and pollution. 10 million deaths compared to COVID is eye opening, too.