Breathing to Burning -- 10/13/17
Hello everybody! Maren here. We woke up to a stinging cloud of smog today and an occasional breeze that refused to move it. The air is grey and thick in Delhi, as it has been all week, and we are not venturing outside of the hotel without our face masks. Recently, the pollution in India has skyrocketed, reaching palpably dangerous levels that threaten humans, animals, and the earth. Today especially, this environmental crisis has left us thinking about and wrestling with the social, biological, and moral conundrums related to Delhi’s air quality.
Every year, pollution sickens thousand of people across India and throws delicate ecosystems into chaos. While large subsets of the living suffer long-term health effects, others die. In the human realm, the vast majority of India’s citizens, especially the poorest, cannot choose between staying inside to avoid the pollutants and going outdoors. In general, the average Indian is exposed to toxic, carcinogenic air pollution and its risks — to threats of asthma, cancer, acid rain, and dangerous gases — every day.
This problem is not, of course, unique to India. Around the word, pollution control and mitigation is grossly underfunded. But currently, Delhi is one of the most polluted cities in the world. When we were asked in class to consider the writings of Mother Theresa, who equated suffering with joy, it was hard to comprehend how this could be true in light of the suffering that we have witnessed here — related to and as a result of the country’s air pollution. Today, I struggled to see the beauty, the grace, and the power that Mother Theresa found in suffering.
And then, tonight, the sky was banded: bright grey to blasted white, cream-tallow to orange-yellow. This week, the plume rose thousands of feet; as the landscape grew darker, the earth became lunar. It was so toxic, so polluted that somehow no scarves, no masks, no windows ever seemed entirely reliable.
Every year, pollution sickens thousand of people across India and throws delicate ecosystems into chaos. While large subsets of the living suffer long-term health effects, others die. In the human realm, the vast majority of India’s citizens, especially the poorest, cannot choose between staying inside to avoid the pollutants and going outdoors. In general, the average Indian is exposed to toxic, carcinogenic air pollution and its risks — to threats of asthma, cancer, acid rain, and dangerous gases — every day.
This problem is not, of course, unique to India. Around the word, pollution control and mitigation is grossly underfunded. But currently, Delhi is one of the most polluted cities in the world. When we were asked in class to consider the writings of Mother Theresa, who equated suffering with joy, it was hard to comprehend how this could be true in light of the suffering that we have witnessed here — related to and as a result of the country’s air pollution. Today, I struggled to see the beauty, the grace, and the power that Mother Theresa found in suffering.
And it was this grainy, tangible quality of the air, the discomfort of breathing, that made the experience so humbling and weighty and powerful.
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