![]() ![]() ![]() She talks over the phone to a family in Malawi who cook with charcoal on a three-stone fire. As they fall asleep, oblivious to the traffic, the noise, the fumes, their father asks, “Where should we go?” She meets a family in New Delhi who live on a highway median, surrounded by lanes on three sides and, above, by an overpass. “It’s a dynamic playing out across the country and around the world,” writes Gardiner, “familiar to those who live beside big garbage transfer stations in the South Bronx, to Chicagoans who fought to force huge stockpiles of dusty, toxic petcoke (a byproduct of oil refining) out of their neighborhoods, to Londoners whose housing budgets consign them to the city’s most traffic-choked corners.” Although pollution respects no boundaries, people living closest to local hotspots usually suffer the most. Gardiner, an accomplished reporter, travels the rich and poor worlds, armed with an air mask, to understand the causes and effects of this silent killer, as well as the solutions. Exposure to toxic air has been linked to a range of diseases, from heart disease to diabetes to pneumonia. That’s so small that the particles can easily move into the bloodstream, organs, and even the brain. More than 90 percent of the world’s population was exposed that year to unsafe levels of PM2.5, particles 30 times smaller than the width of an average human hair. The latest State of Global Air report, released on April 2, finds that toxic air contributed to the deaths of nearly 5 million people in 2017. As one Los Angeles environmentalist tells her, “You see one person run over on the street and you’ll never forget it.” But the thousands of deaths from air pollution “will never even faze you.”Īir pollution is the biggest environmental threat of our times. “nvisibility is a strange feature of this crisis,” writes Beth Gardiner in “Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution.” Pollution’s victims, counted in aggregate and understood only through statistical analysis, are rendered faceless. It can be nearly impossible to directly tie anyone’s particular illness to exposure to bad air, any more than to bad genes or lifestyle choices. Ritz still cannot say for certain whether her own son’s small size was due to the air she breathed. BOOK REVIEW - “Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution,” by Beth Gardiner (University of Chicago Press, 312 pages).īut air pollution is a slippery foe. ![]()
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