Some crimes are so commonplace that no one considers them to be so. Some crimes are committed by so many people that the line between criminal act and normal behaviour is obscured. In the eighties everyone taped albums for their mates, in the noughties no one thought anything of illegally downloading. Dodging tax is a national sport, paying your builder cash in hand, working for a few notes on the golf club bar to help out. It's all fine, isn't it? It's not like anyone gets hurt, as such. No one's going to get arrested over an eighth of weed, these days even a bit of cocaine can be overlooked. When everyone's doing it, is it even a crime any more?
(Before I can be accused of climbing on my moral high horse, I should point out that I have committed all these acts, and far worse, I'm not judging here, more illustrating a point)
I point this out because this week, something else commonplace, something nearly everyone does, crossed the line into criminal act. Not as blatant as snorting a line in a pub toilet, perhaps, but with just as serious real-world consequences.
This week, Philip Barlow, the Inner South London coroner, made history by ruling that air pollution was the cause of death, in 2013, of Ella Kissi-Debrah, a nine year old girl whose walk to school exposed her to nitrogen dioxide and particulate levels far above the legal limits. In short, Ella was killed by drivers. Not any one in particular, but every car, motorbike, van and lorry that clogged the roads of Lewisham was a contributing factor to her tragically early death from acute respiratory failure.
No, no, calm down, I'm not blaming everyone who drives. I'm not accusing you of being a killer because you commute to work or drop the kids off at school. What I am saying, however, is that we now have written into English law vehicle emissions as a contributory factor in the death of a child. It's one hell of a precedent, and it should be the spark of a very serious conversation that we as a nation have to have.
Because we don't talk enough about the down-sides of cars, and I understand why. Everyone loves their car, it's a space that's yours, that signifies freedom and boundless possibility; learning to drive is a rite of passage, and they're just so damned convenient. I understand the emotional attachment people feel towards their pollution-belching death-boxes, and it's this that's stopping us from discussing the situation properly. In the same way meat-eaters shift uneasily at pictures of slaughterhouses, and frequent flyers can erase anything they've ever heard about jet-fuel emissions, drivers can be aware of the consequences in abstract, but no-one really feels that it applies to them. Much as no down-loader ever thought they were robbing an artist of royalties, nobody shoving some gak up their nose ever thought of the brutal conditions that coca is farmed in.
This lack of discussion is deadly. The second part of the coroner''s ruling found that a lack of information regarding Lewisham's regular breaches of British, WHO and EU air quality requirements was also a contributing factor. Simply put, Ella's Mum didn't see the harm in her walk to school, because she didn't know how bad it was. The family lived just 30m from the South Circular Road, there was literally no escape for them from the heavily polluted air. And for as long as the Government, scared of angering drivers, because God forbid we should do that, continues to sweep the matter under the carpet, more people will die.
Most urban areas have had illegal levels of Nitrogen dioxide since 2010, and the misguided widespread switch to diesel. Worldwide, air pollution from vehicle emissions is a contributory factor in 7 million early deaths. And yet we tolerate it, because driving.
I am not saying stop driving. That would be unreasonable in the extreme. The world, for better or worse, is built for cars, and we'd need a pretty major overhaul of transport, service and retail infrastructure before that was feasible. What I am saying is that it's time to start weaning ourselves off them, that it's time to have a conversation about whether we're prepared to tolerate their impact on our environment and health, and about what can be done to mitigate that. I'm saying that it's time to stop unthinkingly assuming that they have to be a part of your life, the default for any journey, because even if everyone does it it is, as of now, potentially, legally, a cause of death.
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