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« Diplomas and nose jobs | Main | So what’s the beef with climate? »
May 8, 2007
Call 911-SMOG
If a deadly strain of an exotic disease were ravaging Los Angeles, the state and federal governments would waste no time declaring a public health emergency. The Department of Health Services and the Centers for Disease Control would mobilize armies of researchers. The governor and the president would authorize the release of as much money as necessary to stop the spread of the epidemic and protect public health.
Last week, the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), a regional planning body, made a plea for help dealing with a public health emergency that kills 5,400 Californians each year: air pollution. SCAG passed a resolution calling on Gov. Schwarzenegger and President Bush to declare a state of emergency in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura and Imperial counties, authorizing extraordinary measures to fight smog.
"When we have a hurricane or earthquake, they declare a state of emergency," said Hasan Ikhrata, director of planning and policy for the regional body. "These numbers are out of this world … so this is significant enough that they should do the same thing." (LAT)
The interesting thing – the disturbing thing – is that SCAG's resolution is seen as an unusual step. Although the health hazards of dirty air are common knowledge, most Americans don't seem ready to move beyond the idea of pollution as something that harms the environment – air, water, soil, trees and wildlife – rather than as the cause of diseases that take a staggering toll in lives each year.
Air pollution kills more people in California each year than auto accidents, homicides and AIDS combined. But if you ask most people what image "air pollution" produces in their mind, they'll say a factory smokestack, not an asthma inhaler. Even in Los Angeles – where, depending on what measurement you use, the air is the most unhealthy in the country – there is a perverse sort of acceptance, even romanticizing, of dirty air as the price paid for living in Paradise.
The notions of "environment" and "health" are moving closer together, if slowly. Findings of industrial chemicals contaminating the bodies of Americans are shifting the idea of pollution from waste affecting the environment to unwanted commercial chemicals that have invaded us all. Even climate change, which most people think of in terms of how hot Earth will be in 50 years, is now being discussed as a catastrophe that will aid the spread of dangerous diseases.
Declared or not, the environmental health crisis is an emergency. The fact that local officials – not celebrity politicians, but everyday public servants who usually focus on basic issues like potholes – are sounding the alarm will help us all wake up to that fact.