Toxic air threatens our future

Amid all the problems currently afflicting humanity, a World Health Organization (WHO) report on toxic pollution in the atmosphere did not get the coverage it deserved.

What reports I saw rightly took up the point that around 93 per cent of the world’s children under the age of 15 are breathing air that is so polluted it is putting their health and development at risk.

Anyone who has spent time in one of India’s major cities will know this only too well, and especially at this time of the year. Face masks are worn outside by all but the foolhardy, eyes sting and streets ring with the sound of hawking and coughing as people try to remove the mess from their throats and lungs.

It is worse at this time of the year when farmers traditionally burn off the remains of their crops to prepare for the new season, which means that not even rural areas are safe.

This toxic smog is a killer — the WHO estimates it kills seven million people worldwide each year and the number is rising.

While the immediate effects on health are distressing and terrible, I believe the long term impact could be far worse — a danger to the structure of civilisation itself.

WHO says that children are the worst affected by the ever rising levels of pollution because their respiratory systems are still developing and they breath faster than adults, therefor inhale more gunk — and also because they are closer to the ground where pollution tends to settle.

All this at a time when their bodies and brains are at the most vulnerable.

The Director of the Social Determinants of Health at WHO, Maria Neira, puts it most starkly when she says air pollution is “stunting children’s brains”.

“It is affecting their health in more ways that we expected,” Neira says.

This was reinforced by the Director General of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who says polluted air is poisoning millions of children and ruining their lives.

“This is inexcusable. Every child should be able to breathe clean air so they can grow and fulfil their full potential,” he said.

What if they don’t? What if our own destruction of the environment; our denial of clean air to our young, damages their mental and motor development, as most scientists agree it will.

What is the future for the human race if subsequent generations are so intellectually damaged that they cannot function in a society increasingly reliant on people to run ever more sophisticated technology?

At best this will produce a hopeless and possibly savage underclass as the divide between those with the means to escape the effects of toxic air and those who are permanently damaged by it becomes an unbridgeable chasm.

At worst a living hell that will make dystopian nightmares like The Handmaid’s Tale and The Hunger Games seem like visions of the Promised Land.

Are there solutions? Of course, there always are, but only in a world where international cooperation is put before narrow national and sectional interests and there is a universal acceptance that some must sacrifice for the good of all.

Unfortunately this is a world increasingly distant in a political climate which is becoming almost as toxic as the air many of us breathe.