In 2022, midway through an epic backpacking trip across South America, I visited Santiago. I took a bus from Mendoza in Argentina that wound spectacularly through the snowy Andes, and crossed the land border into Chile. In the seat next to me was a late-30s traveler from the Dominican Republic, named Angel. Luckily (it was a six hour journey), we hit it off, chatting about our travels and sharing bags of Lay’s salt and vinegar chips all the way to Santiago.
As we entered the city, I commented on how foggy it was. He raised his eyebrows at me, “Girl, that’s not fog”, he said. “That’s smog.”
I was skeptical. “No, I’m pretty sure that’s fog,” I said.
“Believe me,” he replied, “I lived in Mexico City. I know what smog looks like.”
Secretly disbelieving him, I had hopes that the fog would lift and the weather would improve in the coming days.
On my first day in the city, I visited “La Chascona”, once the home of the late Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, now a tourist attraction for the literarily inclined. Built in 1953 for Neruda’s mistress—the name means ‘tangle-haired woman’ in Quechua—the house is labyrinthine and magical, the product of an artist’s life collecting and creating beautiful things. Beside a curved window that constitutes most of La Chascona’s front wall, a plaque explained that Neruda had designed this room so he could look over the city to the Andes in the distance. But unfortunately, the plaque read, the smog is now so bad in Santiago that the Andes are completely obscured.
It turned out Angel was right. The fog would not lift because it was, in fact, smog, and smog does not simply evaporate.
7 September is the UN International Day of Clean Air. For those living in areas with relatively low levels of air pollution, air quality easily slips down the long list of climate concerns. Cape Town’s air is not pristine by any means, but nor is the city permanently shrouded in a thick layer of smog, and people don’t walk down Kloof Street in face masks to avoid breathing toxic fumes. On a typical day, I can see the Stellenbosch mountains in the distance from the CBD.
For me, then, thinking about climate change doesn’t conjure images of dirty air, but this is an oversight. Air pollution is one of the greatest threats to our health and our planet.
The Deadly Effects
Every year, approximately 6.5 million people die prematurely as a consequence of breathing polluted air. To put that into perspective, in the three years since the Covid pandemic struck, dirty air has already killed three times more people than the virus. Indeed, countries with poor air quality have significantly higher mortality rates from COVID because both attack the respiratory system.
Globally, around one in four heart attacks and one in three deaths from stroke are attributed to the effects of air pollution. In South Africa, air pollution is second only to tuberculosis on a long list of public health concerns.
The human death toll is striking. Often overlooked, however, are the non-human animals who endure many of the same negative health affects from dirty air that humans do—damage to respiratory systems, neurological problems and skin irritations. Plants aren’t immune either. Air pollution upends the equilibrium of natural ecosystems, causing outbreaks of disease, increases in pest numbers, and diminished growth of plants and crops.
The disease and death wrought by air pollution on humans, animals, and plants is the tip of the (melting) iceberg: the planet itself bears the brunt. Climate pollutants hang around in the atmosphere, sometimes for days, sometimes for decades, and are directly linked to near-term global warming.
Another Case of Climate Injustice
My failure to identify Santiago’s smog on sight signifies my privilege. I have spent most of my life in leafy surroundings, at a safe distance from industrial areas, steel mills, or coal plants.
As is so often the case with environmental threats, the effects of air pollution are not felt equally; citizens of low- and middle-income countries, and people living in low- and middle-income areas, are disproportionately at risk. The majority of deaths linked to air pollution occur in developing countries. For those living in informal settlements or economically disadvantaged areas—often relegated to the outskirts of cities near landfills or industrial plants—the problem is especially acute.
Polluting culprits, like big mines and industrial plants, are notorious for ignoring their responsibility to communities living in their vicinity.
When shuttered in 2010, for example, a steel mill did nothing to stop toxic dust blowing into the air and the lungs of the Kuils River community, situated just one kilometre from the mill. After changing hands, the mill resumed operations in 2017, and Kuils River is once again smothered in fumes and smoke. Children whose asthma mysteriously disappeared during the mill’s years of inactivity are asthmatic again.
A recent study of soil samples taken from the children’s play areas and gardens of 34 preschools in the Kuils River area revealed dangerously high levels of zinc and arsenic. Parents of sick children—many of whom had been trying to raise the alarm for years—initiated further research into the dust, and found extensive evidence of toxic fallout.
Manmade and preventable
To gain a sense of how different things could be, we need look no further than the example foisted upon us by the pandemic. With major reductions in transport and industry over the past three years, the world has been burning significantly less fossil fuel. The effect on air quality has been immediate and striking. In some urban areas, air pollution has declined by up to 45%. Two weeks into India’s lockdown, people in the Punjab region could see the Himalayas for the first time in 30 years.
The central causes for air pollution differ across regions but almost invariably at least one finger points at transport: cars, taxis, buses, motorcycles, airplanes—anything with an internal combustion engine. Reducing fuel-powered transport will radically improve air quality, and the pandemic has made this undeniably clear.
The blue skies resulting from lockdown prove beyond a doubt that the air pollution crisis is manmade and preventable. The Clean Air Fund estimates that, “2800 premature deaths could be averted by 2040 if Johannesburg implements clean air measures”. Moving away from coal and toward renewable energy sources must be the first step.
Santiago ranks 434 in a list of cities with the worst air quality in the world. That is to say, 433 cities have worse air pollution than Santiago—a city whose surrounding mountains have disappeared from view. For our own health, the health of the animals and plants with whom we share the earth, and for the planet itself, we must recognise air quality for what it is: a matter of life and breath.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Josie is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at King’s College, London. Her dreams for a greener planet include conserving the Western Cape’s tidal pools and the world’s bee population.
