New York City is increasingly unbreathable. The other day, its air was rated the worst of any city in the world. Blame Canada!
Yes, of course, it is Canadian wildfires that are sending their smoke this way. But wildfires are nothing new. California has them regularly, and New York’s sickly yellow sky this week is eerily reminiscent of San Francisco’s similarly sickening sky a couple of years ago. It’s sickening not just to look at, but sickening in the literal sense that it can make people actually sick. As David Wallace Wells recently wrote in the NY Times:« Globally, all forms of air pollution are responsible for perhaps 10 million deaths each year, and, short of mortality, contribute to respiratory disease and cardiac disease, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, dementia, cancer, mental illness and suicide, miscarriage and premature birth and low birth weight. According to some recent research, of all forms of particulate pollution, wildfire smoke may be the most toxic. »
And there is no escaping the smoke, Wells notes: « Sixty percent of the pollution from American wildfires is experienced by people living outside the state in which the trees are actually burning. »
This is, of course, one more classic case of climate change chickens coming home to roost. While political leaders dawdle and dither and keep finding ways to postpone our needed national reckoning with the demon of fossil fuels, while the news media obsesses over the latest political polls and presidential primaries theoretically still many months away, happily distracting us from why we can’t breathe or see more than a few feet in front of us, the crisis continues to escalate. To quote David Wallace Wells again: « the haunting gray glow of the sky this week was both a throwback to a more contaminated past and a portent of a future clouded more regularly by airborne toxic events such as these. »
That future is one I am just barely living to see the beginning of, but which future generations will sadly suffer the full pain of.
Photo: Dave Sanders for the NY Times
