I have seen several newspaper articles recently, here and elsewhere, about how to avoid various forms of pollution associated with increased incidence of cancer, heart disease, metabolic disease and asthma. You should live in areas where air pollution from traffic is relatively low, avoid foods containing anything you wouldn’t use in a home kitchen, stick to organic skincare, laundry soap and cleaning products, memorise the names of all dangerous substances, read every label and eschew anything bad.
I have a better idea: let’s stop messing things up in the first place.
Such fearmongering is a prime example of selling us individual solutions to structural problems. In the same way that not all drivers can be, as most of us apparently imagine ourselves, better or safer than average, not everyone can live in areas with lower than average air pollution. The correlation of poverty with exposure to industrial pollutants goes back centuries. In most European cities the biggest houses surrounded by the most parks and the cleanest water are upwind of 19th-century industrial areas. In modern cities, higher rates of maternal, infant and child mortality are linked to busier roads carrying heavier traffic. We shouldn’t have school playgrounds next to big highways, but also we shouldn’t have anywhere it’s not safe to breathe.
[ Let’s inconvenience some oligarchs before we come for exhausted mothersOpens in new window ]
Naturally those who can afford it live their longer, healthier lives in cleaner parts of town, but widening the gap between rich and poor isn’t the answer. Even if you don’t care about social justice or the lives of children poorer than yours, air pollution moves. It will kill some of us more slowly than others, but in the end we all have to breathe, and actually – I like to remember when stuck behind a bus on my bike – the air inside cars is usually worse than the air breathed by passing cyclists and pedestrians, because we get the wind and weather, whereas the air in cars enters at exhaust-pipe level. You can’t buy clean air.
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Electric cars might seem to solve the problem, but they don’t. Their weight grinds down the roads, producing more particulates than lighter vehicles, they’re environmentally costly to make – and also, air pollution still moves. As long as that electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels, we’ve shifted the epicentre of the pollution away from the roads driven but not eliminated it. This is one of the reasons why I like wind turbines, because they oblige us to see what we’re doing. They’re not harmless, but they are visible, our own energy consumption sitting there in the middle of the view, not smoking away quietly in someone else’s backyard.
(I like them anyway, actually. I find beauty in their languorous turns, a balletic pleasure in the synchronised swirling. Write in if you like, but if some people like to see fancy cars and big motorbikes I don’t see why others shouldn’t admire a fleet of wind turbines.)
The lists of “chemicals” to avoid are similarly pointless, and also irritating to anyone who understands that in fact water, even in its cleanest form, is a chemical, as are most forms of matter. Whatever individual choices we make, everything ends up in the water, in our skin and brain cells and breastmilk (also made of chemicals). Of course if you can afford to buy organically produced stuff, that’s a good choice, both for your own health and for supporting businesses that are part of the solution more than part of the problem, but you can’t buy protection from “forever” pollutants.
The structural problems are so big they’re painful and frightening to consider, but the answer isn’t to buy more stuff or try to spend your way to individual protection. You’re joining the arms race, like people who buy bigger cars to keep themselves safer.
[ To normalise invective against cyclists is to miss the point spectacularlyOpens in new window ]
No one gets to come out of the mess we’re in smelling of roses. We’re all implicated. You can’t buy purity, and money will protect you more than people who have less of it only for a while and to a limited extent. On the other hand, if we used resources making things better instead of worse; if we spent money on mending not breaking things and cleaning not dirtying; if we prioritised health and contentment over endless economic growth; if we used our votes, influence and energy to clean up transport, food chains and the cosmetics industry for everyone rather than trying to save ourselves, we could make quite a big difference.
