Environment: Essay
Not long ago, I found myself wandering around the old, forgotten lanes of southern Bombay, near where my mother and father had gone to college, and admiring the fusty quaintness of the bagpipers on a stretch of lawn, the signs still pointing to the “Bombay Colour Sergeants.” They seemed out of time in this quiet corner of the bustling city, dusty, a little weather-beaten, like a family heirloom abandoned in the attic.
For two or three hours on that sunny winter morning, I savored these relics of what seemed a more careless and silent time. Then, returning to my hotel, I found I couldn’t breathe. The hotel doctor informed me that I’d done the unthinkable—walked around the city streets, inhaling the city’s fetid air. He directed me toward a local hospital, and when I got there I limped out of a taxi, one tiny agonized step at a time, to get such treatment as the overwhelmed staff could offer. It wasn’t long before I realized that fewer people would emerge from its doors than ever went in (and many of them might expire simply of the place’s sadly insufficient facilities).
In Bangkok three months later, I had the same experience; in Shanghai, Calcutta, São Paulo, it could be worse.
I suffer from asthma and so, since infancy, I’ve known the preciousness of air—known, that is, the terror of gulping for air and not knowing where the next breath will come from. Yet now, more and more, I find myself surrounded by new asthmatics, barely able to breathe (or talk or move) as they look for infusions of clean air.
It’s strange to have to think like this. If there’s one thing we should be able to take for granted in our advanced cities of abundance, it’s the air. Yet in Bolivia, I’ve watched schoolchildren in the streets of La Paz, 12,000 feet above sea level and as brilliant and blue-skied a place as I have seen, wearing masks when sitting in the main, flower-filled promenade, to protect them from the fumes. In Mexico City, families have told me that their babies cannot live under the industrial sky; they don’t know how to breathe. And in modern, hyper-convenient Tokyo, whole bars exist to offer desperate customers colored beakers of unpolluted air (for the price of a cup of coffee).
It is a shock to go to the far reaches of Tibet, or even to climb to the place where I write this (a hermitage high above the Pacific in California), because we get a whiff of air as it’s meant to be: so high and cleansing that even the nights are full of stars, of distant lights. The very terms we use—“as light as air,” a “breath of fresh air,” “living on air”—are no longer givens.
Yet air is so fundamental to our existence that we notice it only when we miss it. And then, too often, it’s too late. The first time I visited Kathmandu, almost 20 years ago, it seemed a breath of fresh air in every sense (especially to one in flight from New York’s Rockefeller Center). I sat under high blue winter skies, walked through fields of wildflowers in the suburbs, chanced upon a temple round every dusty corner. Lit only by candles, the place still flickered like a medieval enchantment. In the evenings I sat on the terrace of the Hotel Eden and, watching the sun fade over the mountains, imagined myself in a place that, not long before, when I was born, had hardly seen a road.
Now, by some counts, Kathmandu has the second filthiest skies on the planet. To walk through its ancient streets is to be surrounded by a symphony of coughs. The bad air gets inside your lungs as if it might be the death of us all. There are cities, like Los Angeles, near where I live, and Kyoto in Japan, where I spend much of the year, where regulations have helped to clean up the air substantially in only a few years. But in all the places where the need is greatest, air is a necessity that has come to seem a luxury. Five million people live (and die) in those Bombay streets that brought me to the hospital after nothing more than a leisurely morning stroll.