Lockdown in Paris
Mark Cramer (author of Old Man on a Green Bike and Urban Everesting)
What if we could ward off a life-threatening attack by doing something less than shutting off our normal activities, bunkering in and watching Twilight Zone reruns, both on TV and outside our window?
I’m not talking about COVID-19.
A few days ago I witnessed a young neighbor, girded in life-saving machinery, hustled off by masked men into an ambulance. So far, he’s not come back.
I’m one of the statistically most vulnerable to this frightful invader, and I’m terrified when I hear of increasing numbers of healthcare providers stricken by the virus. But this morning a French philosopher told us on the radio that we should not allow COVID-19 to paralyze us into neglecting other problems we face as a society. (France may be the only country in the world where philosophy is integrated in the core high school curriculum and philosophers appear regularly on TV and radio.)
So please excuse me if I refer to another threat that isn’t in style these days. I’m referring to toxic air, which kills nearly a million people per year in Europe alone, and attacks citizens of other regions with equal potency.
In fact, “toxic air is killing more people than tobacco smoking.”
There’s some degree of choice involved if one decides to stop smoking. But I’ve never seen “Breathing Could Kill You” warnings on Paris municipal message screens.
Deaths caused by air pollution, in order of frequency, include heart disease, other non-communicable diseases, stroke, lung cancer, pneumonia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, this last one resembling the agony of a COVID-19 death.
Lessons we will probably not learn from the COVID-19 lockdown
“A virtual halt in road and air traffic due to confinement measures to fight Covid-19 has resulted in drastic improvements in air quality and reduced greenhouse gas emissions in the Paris region,” according to one reliable source.
So once the COVID-19 has been defeated and a vaccine developed, should we go back to life as usual, willingly tolerating an acceptable death rate of a millions per year from air pollution?
And what about the equally “acceptable” public health catastrophe that “nearly 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year”?
A bold solution
The lockdown we’re currently experiencing is far more Draconian than a post-corona solution needed to drastically curtail the death rate from air pollution and car accidents. We could still hang out in cafés and concerts and enjoy a convivial existence with our species.
I’m referring to the idea of car-free cities. With our lockdown, Paris has become a 90% car-free city. We can now take daily walks, enjoy the clean air, cross the street on a red light, and not come home to wonder when the accumulation of foul air will inevitably cut short our lives.
All the ideas we need are available in the enriching archives of the on-line newsletter, currently suspended but available on the Internet, called Carfree Times, which was published for years by the visionary author and transportation expert J.H. Crawford.
Car-free cities are a less Draconian solution than the COVID-19 shutdown and, above all, can be achieved with creative and economically feasible downsizing of our addiction to fossil fuels.
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