“This planet definitely wants to kill us. I am sympathetic, but not supportive.”
– Jackie Kashian in her special, Stay-Kashian

The South Africa and India Test series has just kicked off in Kolkata, and boy is it hazy. I am guessing they have not yet developed AI tools to clean up the frames of live sport in real time, to sharpen the blurred edges that even high-definition cameras cannot smooth (and to trick us further into rejecting our everyday reality). Aside from the dulled color of life itself, the ever-present smog is a blunt reminder of our disregard for the seriousness of ongoing climate catastrophe.

If you have never been to India, you may not know how unbelievably polluted its urban areas are. The majority of pictures that I have from my visits there, just like any remaining memories of my childhood, seem as though they have been put through an unflattering filter. Much of the nation is permanently caked in unsafe levels of particulate matter, ensuring that nearly half a billion people living across its metropolises predispose themselves to debilitating health conditions.

Vehicle emissions, industrial pollution, dust from desertified and arid landscapes, crop burning and traditional fuel use (burning of wood, coal and dung) in rural communities all lead to air that is unbreathable. Unacceptable yet accepted. Moreover, exacerbated by the priorities of those with money and power.

The World Health Organization’s “safe limit” of PM_2.5 levels is 15 µg/m³ (micrograms per cubic meter). Here is how the organization describes PM_2.5 impacts:

“Fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) can penetrate through the lungs and further enter the body through the blood stream, affecting all major organs.

Exposure to PM_2.5 can cause diseases both to our cardiovascular and respiratory system, provoking, for example stroke, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

New research has also shown an association between prenatal exposure to high levels of air pollution and developmental delay at age three, as well as psychological and behavioural problems later on, including symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety and depression.”

In addition to the above, we know how smog contributes to cognitive difficulties and decline, whether exposure is limited or persistent. The largest Indian cities are regularly at 100 µg/m³ or above for most of the year. The government even has its own ways of distorting the severity of the problem through national regulations that avoid reporting pollution readings above arbitrarily introduced caps.

This air—my past—is our future. No one on this globe can escape the propagation of haze. Smoke hardly respects national borders. And no matter how fluid, adaptive or dynamic our atmospheric habitat is, it cannot escape universal constraints. The more carbon compounds we dig up from our planet’s crust and the more greenhouse gases we expand into our shared, limited air, the shorter our runway is as a viable species.