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November 30, 2021 5:36 PM

In Ten Million a Year, David Wallace-Wells (previously 1, 2, 3), writing in the London Review of Books, helps us comprehend the incomprehensible brutality of air pollution.
posted by rossmeissl (10 comments total)

Related to this, I'd like to give a shout out to a competent public servant, Marc Draisen, who's the ExDir for the regional planning agency in the metro Boston area. I was at a charrette kind of thing for resilience planning in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. During the Q&A, to a small panel of well credentialed folks, I asked something like, "If this generation of planners finally understand the sins of the past related to latent travel demand and that widening roads only makes things worse, then what will be the 'aha' realization that we're currently missing completely?"

Now this is a pretty left field kind of question even for a squishy field like urban planning at a grab-assy event like a Harvard charrette.

He answered at the drop of a hat: air pollution.


(also air quality wasn't even really central to the themes of the event and hadn't been brought up before his answer)
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 6:31 PM on November 30, 2021 [8 favorites]

“Our spread over the earth was fueled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. From the first smoldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artifact we create. The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television program all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more that a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night, and the fires still spread.”

W.G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn
posted by perhapses at 7:03 PM on November 30, 2021 [10 favorites]

Homo incendius, then?

Going back a million years.
posted by jamjam at 7:25 PM on November 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

Going back a million years.

The article touches on this a bit, I think.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:04 PM on November 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

This was a brutal read and I walked away with two things:

1) ‘You see one person run over in the street and you’ll never forget it,’ an environmentalist observes in Choked: The Age of Air Pollution and the Fight for a Cleaner Future.
Thousands dying from the effects of dirty air ‘will never even faze you’.

2) Choked looks like a really good read

Never live by a highway, friends. Your health, and the health of your children, will be measurably worsened and your lives shortened.

Advocate, too, for those who live next to highways due to circumstance beyond their control - because that's where the cheap land they can afford to live on is. No one should live in a sacrifice zone (US-specific link to zone locations) and the fact that such zones exist is a goddamn disgrace.
posted by librarylis at 8:52 PM on November 30, 2021 [4 favorites]

Can we get the fire to fight the fungus?
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:56 PM on November 30, 2021

This looks on a wavelength with R. Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’ (pdf).
posted by progosk at 11:10 PM on November 30, 2021

progosk: "This looks on a wavelength with R. Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’ (pdf)."

attritional lethality is a piercing phrase
posted by chavenet at 12:30 PM on December 1, 2021

This was a good read, thanks for posting. My big local issue is trying to get our school district to electrify busses for exactly this reason.

However, I could do without the comparisons to obesity and they really undercut the credibility of the pollution mortality numbers. The mortality calculations for obesity are…controversial, to say the least.
posted by shesdeadimalive at 5:36 PM on December 2, 2021

Well, using obesity as a public health deflection is something governments do all the time, we have to study it in order to have a response.

Sen Cassidy: "
“We have a higher incidence of cigarette smoking, of obesity, of certain viral infections, and other things which increase the incidence of cancer in our state,” Cassidy said. “So whenever you speak of Cancer Alley ... you have to do what is called a regression analysis to separate out those factors … and several others that could be an alternative, and a more typical explanation for why some folks may have cancer. When you do that, the amount of cancer which is left unexplained is pretty marginal.”

And Yet, Cassidy has militated against the science necessary for such a regression. We cannot afford to look away; to look away just gives him the power.

Tulane has conducted a regression on the data available, which don't include obesity. Obesity seems to be random. Smoking is way way down in Cancer Alley, and Air Pollution Risk is associated with Cancer Incidence in Poor and Black block groups.

The Louisiana Governor also cited "Obesity" as a reason that Black Louisianans were more likely to die from COVID, although the Data Center's report mostly cited the types of employment available to Black Louisianans as the killer--and cited Hypertension as the most common co-morbidity.

Workers of color are overrepresented in essential retail (56 percent), transportation and trade (50 percent), and health care and social assistance (49 percent).

But again, it's important to study obesity to diffuse this deflection away from the difficult, structural problems.
posted by eustatic at 10:50 AM on December 6, 2021