Smog, like pain, might be our friend because it tells us something is wrong
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Clean Air Act, a piece of federal legislation that has succeeded so remarkably that we no longer find clean air remarkable enough to commemorate passage of the law that made it so.
The generations that came after the baby boomers may not even remember the perpetual haze known as smog that hung over our cities the year around, nor the initial anger and put-uponedness generated by mandates for smokestack scrubbers, catalytic converters and even something that today seems rather obvious — the removal of lead from gasoline.
For a decade cars sputtered and “hesitated” when you punched the gas pedal until engineers got it right. Great swaths of western-sloped forests and fish in high-altitude lakes had to die before the public fully bought in. Having conclusively been proved wrong, acid-rain deniers blithely moved on to become climate-change deniers. So it goes.
Yet the Clean Air Act also ushered in today's antiseptic era, on the general scientific theory that if a little is good, more is better. In one short century, we went from not even understanding what germs really were, to the idea that they all must be killed. Television commercials for cleansers, wound treatments and mouthwashes used supposed infrared imaging to show how you might have thought you killed all the germs on that counter surface, but there were still a couple that — without the super cleaning power of Scrubbing Bubbles — you were likely to have missed.
This universal sanitization of a nation has bled into all aspects of life, including language, so it is surprising we can still refer to them as “Canadian” wildfires instead of Delta wildfires, but it is only a matter of time.
These wildfires have shown the American East (the American West already knew) what things were like in the bad old days when smog stung the eyes and burned the lungs. For people in the open air, breathing the particulates from wildfires are akin to smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day.
The pandemic has had an interesting effect on our perspective of lung health. Children, of course, stayed home from school as mandated by the districts, but — almost like remote work — when the restrictions were lifted, many kids have shown a reluctance to go back to school.
There are many theories for this chronic absenteeism, but buried in the data is a curious factor: asthma. Childhood asthma has been steadily on the rise since 1980, and although recent data is choppy due to a change in methodology and the pandemic itself, it appears that something like one out of 12 children are affected.
The causes of asthma are murky, but pollutants are thought to be a cause, so it’s counterintuitive that as the air has gotten cleaner and smoking rates have decreased, asthma among children continues to rise by about 6% a year.
Asthma and allergies are closely related, so it may or may not be coincidence that other common allergies have risen apace. Sixty years ago, peanut allergies were unheard of, as were most allergies of any kind. There was that rare kid allergic to bee stings, but nothing in terms of food. On matriculating into first grade you were essentially handed a reading primer and a peanut butter sandwich and away you went.
As with asthma, there’s a lot we don’t know about peanut allergies, but two leading culprits stand out: a lack of sunlight and excessive cleanliness. Kids who get outside play get a natural dose of vitamin D, but in the indoor digital age, deficiencies are more likely to occur.
But kids also miss out on another vitamin D, as in Dirt.
Researchers have noted something strange about children of farmers and foreign kids who have moved to America: They don’t have our level of allergies. Nor do they, as a general thing, have our obsession with germs and phobia of soil.
Allergies are a response to suspected enemies, and cells have a fear of the unknown. Exposure to microbes at a young age tells the body what is friend and what is foe, but without rooting around in the dirt or otherwise being exposed to a broad range of organisms, these baselines are never established. We make it worse by indiscriminately killing things we can’t see.
Long after we knew that COVID-19 was airborne, we were still sanitizing credit cards, swapping out ink pens and engaging in obsessive hand-washing. We believed in the power of $5-a-bottle hand sanitizer, but not in free face masks.
The more that climate change becomes visible (wildfire smoke as opposed to invisible carbon dioxide and methane), the more we accept its existence. Just like we did 60 years ago. Smog, like pain, might be our friend because it tells us something is wrong.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Clean Air Act led to better breathing, but also over-sanitation
