Clean Air

When I was young, my family would go to New Hampshire to visit my grandfather. The air was clean. When we returned to New York City, it was easy to smell the difference.

When I was thinking about what is important--in looking for starting points--I mentioned health. Clean air is not unrelated.

We take clean air for granted, I think. Certainly the public debate in the US is not dominated by outrage at polluters; we hear about the bank meltdown, and the war in Iraq, and we hear plenty about greenhouse gasses and the need to reduce them. Maybe in the US we don't worry about it because we each do it ourselves: we drive our cars and light our furnaces to heat our water and our homes. But realistically, companies do these same things at a higher order of magnitude: we are often disgusted when we see a smoking car go by, but companies run fleets of trucks, often diesel trucks. Manufacturing processes often emit a far dirtier and more dangerous chemical profile than simply burning fossil fuels.

The air seems clean enough (to most of us, though, of course, rising asthma rates suggest issues with air cleanliness). But clean air is both a privilege and a right.

What a wonderful thing it is to breathe deeply! It is both one of the most basic and most profound pleasures that we can enjoy. How terrible to have this basic pleasure and sign of health taken from us.

Wouldn't it be great if the air were clean? Wouldn't it be great if we could breathe deeply? Wouldn't it be great if a generation of children could enjoy that same privilege?

A stock image from science fiction is that of the world so polluted that its people must flee, or must live in domes, or must wear gas masks. These all seem like terrible fates for the human race to accept, not to mention the other races that have no opportunity to find a technological response. And yet, if we do not value our clean air--if we do not value it because we don't need to pay for it right now--is it not possible that some fate of this sort will come about?

What could be more important than clean air?
Stay tuned for my next post in which I refute the premise that clean air is the most important thing by saying that clean water is.