The Air That We Breathe

 Air!

In country Australia we take it for granted.

I have taught Wants vs Needs to many classes of students and Air goes to the top of Needs (Air, Water, Food, Shelter, Love) ......and then we forget about it and talk about water, food, shelter and love because how could we be short of air?

We forget about it because in country Australia we have been able to take for granted that we have clean air. Never mind that 90% of the global population doesn't have clean air, 6.6 million people die each year from air pollution and that it is the fourth biggest cause of death (only high blood pressure, smoking and poor diet beat it). Many of us have been privileged enough to be able to take it for granted. 

The other contributing factor is that normally air pollution increases slowly and we habituate to it. We forget that we once used to be able to see the distant hills crystal clear, we forget that the sky was once always clear blue and we forget the smell of clean fresh air. 

And yet thirty years ago I stood on Hawkesbury Lookout and watched over the years the brown layer of smog over Sydney rising higher and higher until it reached the lookout and kept climbing up the Blue Mountains. 

Five years ago I did assignments on the health effects indoors air pollution during my Grad Dip Environmental Health Practise. I read the research on how gas cooktops and wood fires contribute to chronic lung disease and asthma. Despite having asthma myself I didn't feel the connection to me. I did assignments on the health effects of the coal power stations in the Hunter Valley, but I didn't connect it to me.

It took until Black Summer and the two month long bushfires here on the Far South Coast of NSW to finally realise what a precious thing clean air is. Two months of living with hazardous air, of not being able to see blue sky and worsened asthma. Two months of knowing that breathing this air was taking years off my life but also worse still my seven year old granddaughter's life. Two months of trying to stay inside but knowing that it was seeping through the cracks of the house and that inside wasn't safe either. And you couldn't get away from it, the entire east coast of Australia was smothered in smoke. I hadn't expected how not being able to breathe safe air affected me psychologically. 

Then while we were still cleaning ash out of the house COVID hit the world. Now the air that we breathe is potentially contaminated with infectious aerosols. 

Suddenly air has gone from something I took for granted to something thats safety cannot be assumed. 

I bought an air purifier towards the end of the fires. I was tired of having no safe place from the smoke. It was shipped from China where air pollution has been a major problem for years and major cities almost never see blue skies. I put an air quality app on my phone so know I can see that even though the smoke seems better than the day before it is merely unhealthy instead of hazardous. This month I bought a CO2 monitor so I can indirectly measure the quality of the ventilation inside spaces.

And what all these devices have shown me is that I have been kidding myself that the country air I breathe has been safe all these years. The air purifier flashes red and sucks furiously when I fry something in the kitchen (even with the exhaust fan and range hood on). The air quality app lets me know that the winter wood fires and winter hazard reduction burns are creating dangerous levels of particulates. The CO2 meter shows that when the house if closed up overnight the CO2 creeps up to high levels, especially if you close the bedroom door. It also shows that the main street of a country town has high levels of CO2 from the cars driving by. Clean air cannot be taken for granted and it is only when you measure it and compare it to levels that affect your health that you realise it. 

Victorian London had notoriously hazardous air quality but regulations on industry improved the air quality. Today we need to wean ourselves quickly from petrol and diesel cars and fossil fuel powered electricity. We have normalised the millions of deaths the air pollution from these causes each year. These deaths are not inevitable. We chose them when we chose governments that fail to decarbonise as fast as possible. We must urgently get away from fossil fuels to stop climate change fuelled bushfires worsening each year and we need to finally realise just how precious clean air really is.