Atmospheric pollution in cities – 03/22/2023 – Jorge Abrahão

She was a university professor. An immigrant from the confines of Europe, she saw Brazil as a paradise that never came to be confirmed. But, thanks to her courage and persistence, she validated her university degree and, even almost overcome by bureaucracy, made a living and conquered space in a top university in the country. Remarkably, she couldn’t understand why everyone knew when she called, even though she didn’t leave a message: it’s just that after 30 years the accent was still one of her trademarks and denounced her, even without wanting to. The image we make of ourselves, most of the time, does not correspond to reality.

When the daughters reached maturity, life was heading towards a moment of fullness. It was then that the news arrived, the same one that, with variations, sooner or later, will reach all of us: the announcement of a tumor in the lung, even without having ever put a cigarette in your mouth. Fright, anguish, cough, cough, cough, family consternation and, once again, the realization that we cannot postpone what we want in life.

The ISS (Health and Sustainability Institute) has been revealing for a long time that 4,700 people die from respiratory diseases in the city of São Paulo each year. The number is four times higher than another that haunts us and is gaining more and more space in society —the number of homicides in the city—, but it is unknown to most people and disregarded by public administrators. Pollution in the city affects us in ways we cannot imagine, causing multiple consequences that are difficult to correlate.

Recently, the UN announced a study that indicates that 99% of people in the world breathe polluted air. The respected Lancet magazine published another work, which shows pollution as being responsible for nine million premature deaths in the world. In the eagerness to generate growth, humanity insists on not understanding the impacts of the current development model. Some people, aware of the risks we are taking, ring bells, but the majority turn a deaf ear and go on with their lives in a hurry —the “soul of our businesses”, as Paulinho da Viola says in “Sinal Fechado”—without realizing the impacts they produce.

In this context, it is up to the government to have a vision of what affects us and anticipate decisions. The cruelest pollution comes from the fine particles that we inhale and enter the bloodstream, causing cardiovascular and respiratory impacts. They are produced, above all, by diesel from public transport. Public policies to modernize bus fleet engines, for example, would greatly reduce the population’s risk of death. A recent example comes from the Municipality of São Paulo, which prohibited the purchase of diesel-powered buses, which could generate a reference for other Brazilian cities.

In addition, cities do not monitor air quality according to the standards required by international bodies. There are interests behind this complacency, since the biased measurement —as if a thermometer only showed a fever when it reached 40 degrees— hampers the diagnosis of a huge number of people who get sick, but financially benefits economic groups that want to postpone changes, avoiding investments in the short term.

Ainafets was her strange name, a combination of prefixes and suffixes from the names of characters in her parents’ favorite novels. Perhaps inspired by this, she herself lived the romance of her life, extracting what was beautiful from inhospitable situations, as if she were trying to escape the hardships of reality. But, in the spring of her 60s, she received news she hadn’t expected. The savings accumulated until then, calculated according to investment manuals, made the idea of ​​living off the investment interest, which would supposedly finance the good times of retirement, be directed towards the exams and the dubious surgeries that promised him more time. of life.

What mattered was to gain some time, even if indeterminate. Procrastinated meetings, unspoken declarations, postponed trips and postponed pleasures would no longer be experienced. The daughters and her husband were left feeling homesick while the city’s pollution continued unscathed in its search for new victims.

How long will we be subject to private interests to the detriment of the public? In mobility, in waste, in lighting, in works, in social networks. The modern, the current, the innovation, are not necessarily the super technological solutions. What is new, in a country like Brazil, is solving old problems that affect most people and that we have been unable to solve until now: poverty, sanitation, decent income, housing, violence, education, health and air and water pollution.

The modern is the inversion of priorities, it is the courage to face insensitive and invisible powerful, it is investing in the most vulnerable, it is reducing inequalities, it is respect and solidarity. These are universal values ​​that have existed for a long time, but have been forgotten in the face of a superficial appeal to the modern, which places algorithms and artificial intelligence above basic needs.

The day will come when the common and public interest will be the protagonist of the times. And then? Then maybe there will be light.

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