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Let’s clean up the air we breathe
• THERE are two modern plagues afoot just now and one of them is hard to hide from.
Wash our hands and keep away from Mexico and we can almost certainly escape swine flu; the other menace is as hard to avoid as old pestilences that flew by night.
In earlier centuries there were pockets of safety, a village here or there, that escaped death, and famously there was that patch on the Heath where everyone lived through one of the plagues. In gratitude, people christened it The Vale of Health. The Vale turns out still to be a good place to live in this current plague because, short of having a 200-acre estate in Wiltshire, the best place to live is well away from a main road. Any road.
The deadly new plague is the poisonous air we breathe. I didn’t take bad air too seriously until last week when I went to a public meeting of the Sustainability Task Force at the Town Hall. There I understood for the first time what “sustainability” means.
Professor Frank Kelly of King’s College told us things which enraged me. For instance, the lungs of little children living next to a busy road do not grow in step with the rest of their bodies. The children become adults with too-small lungs which leads to all sorts of problems. Their parents live as much as a decade less than the guy with a place in Wiltshire or even in a leafy square well away from Kentish Town Road. Heaven knows what happens to people working in Camden High Street or will happen to those children for whom a school is being built in the toxic swirl of Swiss Cottage. Playgrounds should not be next to one main road, let alone three. We’ll have to start right away to think about the air quality when we consider where to build a building where people congregate.
Even before that we have to figure out right now how to lower the emissions from traffic. We have a low emissions zone in Camden but Simon Birkett of the Campaign for Clear Air told us in no uncertain terms that we must make the conditions for using it more stringent. Taxis mainly have diesel engines which emit a dangerous soot and for some reason the particulate filters that have been fitted to London buses are boosting the levels of nitrogen dioxide to toxic levels higher than any other city’s in Europe.
I wonder why mayor Boris Johnson is introducing measures that will worsen the air and why the government is busily working on a request to extend our exemption from cleaning up the air we breathe until 2015. “Sustainability” has to do with sustaining life. I hope we get the hang of it.
Priscilla McBride
Chalcot Square, NW1
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