The Real Dangers of Air Pollution

By Adam Voiland

Sago pos team,... It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that there are better things you could do for your health than take deep breaths on a smoggy day. A growing pile of research suggests that even relatively low levels of air pollution may be more harmful than previously realized, to both heart and lungs. The latest salvo from researchers, published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, focuses on how particulate matter from air pollution affects lung function. The new research buttresses studies (here and here) published earlier this year by the same journal showing that air pollution contributes to heart problems. How much should you worry? U.S. News asked leading experts to put this latest news in context. Some key questions and answers: What is particulate pollution? According to an American Lung Association report, particulate pollution refers to the mix of solid and liquid particles in the air that can come from natural sources, such as dust storms or wildfires, or from such human activity as the burning of fossil fuels in factories or the use of diesel engines. Other particulates are produced when certain chemicals and substances react with one another in the atmosphere.

What is the danger to my heart and lungs? The effect of low levels of particulate pollution found in many urban areas is not unlike secondhand smoke, experts say. Studies show that short-term adverse effects from particulates include diminished lung function, coughing, wheezing, cardiac arrhythmias, and heart attacks. Long-term exposure can also worsen asthma, slow normal lung growth, damage lung airways, and increase the risk of dying from lung cancer and cardiovascular disease.

How big is the risk to me? Certain populations, such as the very old and the very young, are the most vulnerable to air pollution. However, even the most alarming studies conducted in the most polluted areas suggest that the average person's individual risk from exposure is very slight. Relative risk numbers often seem more frightening than they actually are, says Erik Rifkin, an environmental scientist and the coauthor of a book about assessing health risks titled The Illusion of Certainty: Health Benefits and Risks. For example, an earlier study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that short-term exposure to traffic fumes tripled the risk of heart attacks in heart-attack survivors. What's easily forgotten, says Rifkin, is that the risk was extremely small to start with. Jogging or having sex, for example, could elevate the risk of a heart attack by a similar amount, says Robert Brook, a cardiac physician at the University of Michigan.

What's the big deal if the risk to an individual is small? From a public health perspective, even a tiny increase in risk multiplied by millions of people translates into tens of thousands of unnecessary illnesses, hospitalizations, and premature deaths, experts say. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that each year some 65,000 Americans have cardiac events associated with uncontrolled air pollution levels.

How can I protect myself? Short of moving to the countryside or at least away from busy roads, shielding yourself from the effects of air pollution is not easy. Masks won't work, as many particles can slip right through. At the very least, suggests Murray Mittleman, a cardiologist at Harvard University, people who regularly exercise outdoors near highways may want to consider remapping their route.

How can I find out about the quality of the air in my local area? The American Lung Association has a Web tool that allows you to type in your ZIP code and get a detailed report on the air quality in your area. You'll find everything from grades for particulate and ozone pollution (Chicago gets an F for particulates, for example, while Cheyenne gets an A) plus a breakdown that shows how many unsafe pollution days the region has had and how many people in the area are at high risk.

Air Of Danger

Sago team Post

Robert Macfarlane revels in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's writing about flight

The Doldrums, the strip-zones of low pressure which roam equatorial seas, are notorious for their punishing tranquillity. Silver water basking under blue skies; painted ship, painted ocean. As sailors have long known, though, the Doldrums are also given to violence. Squall lines sweep suddenly across them. Hot water makes hot, wet air, which rises in fierce up-draughts, before thickening and braiding into typhoons and tornadoes.

In his aeronautical masterpiece, Wind, Sand and Stars (1939), Antoine Saint-Exupéry describes the first seaplane crossing of the South Atlantic, made by his friend Jean Mermoz in May 1930. When Mermoz reached the Doldrums, they were in a turbulent mood:

"Waterspouts stood in apparently motionless ranks like the pillars of a temple. On their swollen capitals rested the dark and lowering arch of the storm, but blades of light sliced down through cracks in the arch, and between the pillars the full moon gleamed on the cold stone tiles of the sea. Mermoz made his way through those empty ruins, banking for four hours from one channel of light to another, circling round those giant pillars with the sea surging up inside them, following those flows of moonlight towards the exit from the temple."

Saint-Exupéry's writings, the finest in aerology - among the finest in all exploration - are full of moments such as these: moments when, aloft, one suddenly "passes beyond the borders of the real world", and into a realm so elemental that it seems otherworldly.

In Night Flight (1931), Southern Mail (1929), and Flight to Arras (1942), he writes of crash-landings in the "mineral country" of the desert, of long journeys in darkness over sea and sand, of crossing high mountain passes while "sprays of lightning" illuminate the peaks. He writes, too, of miracles; of how, on a night-flight south, a pilot will move through seasons in a matter of hours, "leaving behind the rains and snows of the North, repudiating winter, he throttles back his engine and begins his descent through a midsummer sky into the dazzling sunlight of Alicante".

No one has written about air like Saint-Exupéry. Air was a substance whose beauty so astonished him that he often lapsed into dream-like states while at the controls: the aeroplanes he was flying did not have autopilot. "I live", he once wrote, "in the realm of flight".

Saint-Exupéry, or Saint-Ex as he was widely known, learnt his trade as a pilot while working for Latécoère, the company which in the late 1910s opened up the first air routes into Africa and South America. The Latécoère pilots were not today's stern men of gold braid and flight-bag, shuttling between the duty-free zones of the world's cities. They were a clerisy of risk-takers, a young aerial aristocracy. Men like Mermoz pushed their planes far above their operational ceilings. When they returned, "it was only to set out again". Saint-Ex began by venerating these men, then he became one of them.

With Latécoère, Saint-Ex flew some of the most hazardous early mail routes over the Mediterranean, the Sahara and the Andes. During these years, he encountered the two elemental trinities - "wind, sand and stars", "mountain, sea and storm" - which he would worship for the rest of his life. And he came to understand that he was a man who found himself by getting lost. Flying, radioless, with limited fuel, above desert or ocean expanses, was his preferred state. He felt most at home in "a remoteness beyond possibility of homecoming".

It is extraordinary that Saint-Ex lived as long as he did. He describes once piloting over the lightless Libyan desert for hours on a clouded night. Glimpsing "the gleam of water at the bottom of a crevasse in the fog", he realises that he has been flying mistakenly over open sea - a navigational error which almost kills him. On another occasion, he and a navigator crash-land in the Libyan desert and, against all odds, walk to safety. They pass on foot through a vast area of dunes which are covered "with a single layer of shining black pebbles". "It is", wrote Saint-Ex, "as if we are walking on scales of metal, and all the domes around us shine like armour. We have fallen into a metallic world. We are locked in an iron landscape."

On another occasion, piloting a seaplane through stormy air far above water, he notices the "great white palm leaves which seem to cover the sea's surface, marked with veins and flaws and petrified in a kind of frost". It is an exquisite sight, but Saint-Ex knows that this is "no place to put down," for the frost is in fact the sign of turbulent water seen from altitude: not "beautiful palm leaves" at all, but "poisonous flowers".

In Saint-Ex's writing, we are always seeing down on to the world, and reinterpreting it as a consequence. "A person taking off from the ground," he once remarked, "elevates himself above the trivialities of life into a new understanding." The Greeks had a name for the person who saw from above. They called him the katascopos - a word which later came to mean spy, or explorer - and for them, the sight gained from height was close to god-like. Saint-Ex was a katascopos in every sense of the word, and to read his prose - terse, epigrammatic, visionary - is to share in some part that salutary aerial view, that fresh cosmic perspective.

"We are living on a wandering planet", he beautifully observed. "From time to time, thanks to the aeroplane, it reveals to us its origin: a lake connected with the moon unveils hidden kinships. I have seen other signs of this." This idea of connection - an idea that was both environmentalist and humanist in its implications - joins all of Saint-Ex's writing, right through to his mystical work, Citadelle, unfinished at the time of his death (he died as he dreamed, disappearing in July 1944 during a reconnaissance flight over the Mediterranean). Up in his sky-lab, Saint-Ex developed a socialist version of heroism: a belief - in the words of his best English translator - William Rees, that "human solidarity was the only true wealth in life, mutual responsibility the only ethic".

This ideal was deeply involved, for Saint-Ex, with the view from above - the aeronaut's vision. In the short, exquisite prologue to Wind, Sand and Stars, he described his first night flight in Argentina:

"It was a dark night, with only occasional scattered lights glittering like stars on the plain. Each one, in that ocean of shadows, was a sign of the miracle of consciousness. In one home, people were reading, or thinking, or sharing confidences. In another, perhaps, they were searching through space, wearying themselves with the mathematics of the Andromeda nebula. In another they were making love. These small flames shone far apart in the landscape, demanding their fuel. Each one, in that ocean of shadows, was a sign of the miracle of consciousness ... the flame of the poet, the teacher, or the carpenter. But among these living stars, how many closed windows, how many extinct stars, how many sleeping men ..."

"We must", Saint-Ex concluded, "surely seek unity. We must surely seek to communicate with some of those fires burning far apart in the landscape."

Dangerous world

Sago post Team,Michelet Etienne was kicking a soccer ball around the warren of cinderblock hovels where he lives when a U.N. patrol thundered by and gunmen leaped from their hiding places to spray it with bullets. When the shooting was over, the 12-year-old lay bleeding and unconscious amid piles of garbage and potholes filled with fetid water. A stray bullet had blown out part of his skull and severed his spinal cord, rendering his skinny legs useless. "I can't bring my feet together," the listless child whimpered in the crowded recovery ward of St. Joseph's Hospital a week later. "I can't move my feet." Like hundreds of other hapless bystanders over the last year, Michelet was caught in the crossfire between gunmen and besieged peacekeepers, an increasingly dangerous fact of life for the 2.5 million Haitians doomed to the teeming slums of this capital. With the approach of Tuesday's elections, the first since President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled an armed rebellion two years ago, pressure has mounted on U.N. forces to break the gangs' stranglehold on the city. The crackdown has accelerated the deaths and injuries. Aristide loyalists claim that some of the casualties are victims of trigger-happy peacekeepers in league with corrupt Haitian police. Diplomats call the gunmen common criminals who are trying to protect their drug- and gun-running operations from the United Nations force, which is made up of more than 9,000 soldiers and police from three dozen countries, mostly in Latin America and Asia. It used to be that most of the shooting victims came from a couple of trouble spots, slums such as Cite Soleil and Bel Air, said Ali Besnaci, a French physician who heads the trauma clinic run by Doctors Without Borders at St. Joseph's. "Now the problem has spread all over," he said. Of the more than 300 gunshot victims treated at St. Joseph's in the last six weeks, at least half were women, children and elderly, clearly not combatants in the city's street-by-street clashes, Besnaci said. In December, Doctors Without Borders' two downtown emergency units treated 220 people with bullet wounds, 26 of those in a single, violent day after Christmas. Among the victims were a 15-month-old and a 77-year-old. Since the aid group arrived here 13 months ago, its volunteer surgeons have treated nearly 2,500 people. "It's terrible. It's simply unacceptable," Besnaci said as he visited the bedsides of the maimed, laid out in rows of gurneys and covered with stained sheets.

An Amuzing World II

Greenpeace is a non-profit organisation with a presence in 40 countries across Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific. As a global organisation, Greenpeace focuses on the most crucial worldwide threats to our planet’s biodiversity and environment. They campaign to: Stop climate change Protect ancient forests Save the oceans Stop whaling Say no to genetic engineering Stop the nuclear threat Eliminate toxic chemicals Encourage sustainable trade “Greenpeace has been campaigning against environmental degradation since 1971 when a small boat of volunteers and journalists sailed into Amchitka, an area north of Alaska where the US Government was conducting underground nuclear tests. “To maintain its independence, Greenpeace does not accept donations from governments or corporations but relies on contributions from individual supporters and foundation grants.” What you can do..... Make a donation: Since Greenpeace does not accept donations from governments or corporations; and relies on contributions from individuals and foundation grants, your donation will make a difference. Become an online activist: The community activists hail from 125 countries and territories. Sign up and you get a monthly e-zine and action alerts full of ways to be a one - minute activist. It’s all free. Volunteer: From envelope- stuffing to Amazon surival training, many working in Greenpeace offices today started out as volunteers. Some countries provide action and non-violence training to those willing to become activists. Talk to your local Greenpeace office or contact the international office in Amsterdam. Join one of the Green peace ships: Like Isha has shown, sailing aboard a Greenpeace ship can be the experience of a lifetime. Many ask; few are chosen. To apply, send your CV to: Greenpeace Marine Services, Ottho Heldringstraat 5, 1066 AZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands. They value maritime experience, safety training, and a wide range of skills in their professional crew. You can help save the world, every day. Visit Greenpeace to see how you can make changes.

An Amuzing World

A Green World - Article on Isha Anand for mE magazine 24 Sept Isha Anand is just one of the many people trying to make the world a greener place. Peacefully Once upon a time, there was a girl. Like most people of her ilk that do not fit a precise mould, she was labelled many things. After years of a bohemian lifestyle, she stunned everyone by opting for an interesting career. Isha Anand found her calling as a cook with Greenpeace. While the rest of the world plans to do something to save the world, she actually goes out and does it! In 2004, Greenpeace’s flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, visited the tropical forests of Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea and the nearby archipelagos to document what is being lost, support the people working to protect it, and hold accountable those responsible for the destruction. The crew page of the web log has her introduction, where she mentions, “I hope I can make a difference, somehow!” She certainly gave it her best. By January 28 that year, Isha was immersed in the hard work it takes to save the world. On the web log, she talks about working hard in sauna-like conditions in the ship’s hold on a rainy day. By the end of that voyage, the better part of which she spent cooking because the cook was ill, Isha had found her calling. She returned to Mumbai to sort out some paperwork. In June 2005, she was back on ship. This time as a cook, sailing into the Arctic with the thin ice project, to fight global warming. Her shipmate Melanie remarks on the voyage’s web log: “This is Isha’s first time above the Arctic Circle, in sea ice, and seeing whales and seals. She is positively awestruck and describes feeling ‘numb with delight’. That kind of excitement doesn’t wane… I feel the same kind of excitement and awe that she does.” Isha underlines that she is a cook and not a chef “purely to avoid getting beaten up by other chefs who are trained professionals, egoistical and fussy… I learnt to cook watching the women in my family and my uncle. For them, it was a party in the kitchen and the philosophy was love, a magic ingredient! Cooking is a way to share love. That’s my basis as well.” Isha eloquently articulates her feelings when asked what it feels like to be so far north on the planet. “Being an Indian, it’s hard to explain but I will try. Home is the tropics, and the North was always the Himalayas. The roof of the world was Tibet. What a tiny picture of the world, eh? One e-mail and it is split wide open. An offer to travel to Greenland with the Arctic Sunrise, I would never see the world in the same way again. How can you? “How can anyone who has seen life above the Arctic Circle? Heavenly it is, white clouds blanket you and blue skies peek through, promising a boundless outer world even higher… “I had heard of global warming and climate change. They sounded like a real threat, but never did I REALISE it… It’s been dawning on me… Looking out here is like looking into our past. “I see it now. Ice is life. It gives life little by little, and no one understands it better than the people who have lived here for thousands of years… It’s a hard life but it’s also free… “We must protect our home, it is the only one we have, without bombarding it with things we create because, honestly, we might be mighty but not mightier than Mother Nature. Here, Nature humbles me, shows me how puny we are and it’s beautiful to feel that way. It is the truth. The Arctic is a birthplace of life pure and painful. I shall always revere it and respect it…” On January 18, 2006, Isha sailed on a project that linked three continents. Isha’s post on the ship’s log is as stirring as always, “Life is magic and dreams, reality. Everything here is beyond understanding, comprehension… what are we going to leave behind? Surely we must protect it. None of us can create anything as splendid. This is my deepest desire and I hadn’t known it ‘till I was on board the Rainbow Warrior the first time that I will dedicate my life to this planet, to explore it, understand it, love it, protect it like it were my most precious belonging… It’s hard, hard work… trying to protect the oceans and its creatures. It is a choice we all make in our hearts, and nothing else makes sense. I am so grateful, so humbled to be able in this lifetime to do a little bit and will strive every day to do more, so that our planet can grow. And grow!” Isha has a job of immense responsibility. Her duties as a cook involve provisioning of the ship, prior to a voyage, an immense task because “at sea, there are no food shops to visit in case I run out of butter or salt. That’s a huge responsibility. Then, managing the stores, maintaining general cleanliness of the fridges and galley and catering two warm meals a day for 15-30 pax (people).” Her favourite part? “I have access to ingredients from all over the world… it’s divine, like a fantasy playground or experimental lab. And I love birthdays. A cake is traditional on board and I enjoy baking them. It’s my attempt at making the ship a better place, a happier one.” Isha also participates in other aspects of the ship’s missions. Like the ones to record the shipment of illegal timber from national parks in Kalimantan, Indonesia; recording climate change research in the Arctic. “But the most harrowing of all was the anti whaling campaign in the southern ocean. I have been so lucky and humbled to be part of this movement... (I spent) Sleepless nights of heartache and tears when we couldn’t save the whale we had been trying for four hours in the cold... well, you take the good with the bad. And, after a while, it’s all good. It is hard to describe what it’s like, every moment for me at sea is memorable." Isha’s philosophy of food preparation has changed after working with Greenpeace. She uses organic ingredients wherever possible, keep things as close to raw as possible, and uses a minimum of ingredients. Check out the delicious meal she cooked up for some of us recently Isha’s definition of Greenpeace, “An environmental organisation that works toward spreading awareness about the condition of the planet. By bearing witness, peacefully and non - violently observing what is being done to the planet and bringing what we see to the world so they can open their eyes and work toward saving what they love.” — As told to Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal

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