Sparks: Burnham urged to launch inquiry into unequal health impacts of air pollution
One hundred and fifty people sign a letter asking one man to investigate a harm that four hundred thousand breaths a day already prove - who, precisely, gave him the authority to decide whether the poor may breathe?
What this inquiry proposes to call an environmental health matter is more usefully classified as a question of distributive justice, and the consilience test is simple: if it were truly about air quality alone, the wealthiest postcodes would show the same readings as the poorest.
As water finds the lowest channel and pools there, so does the smoke-heavy air settle into the streets where the poorest live, and no inquiry is needed to draw what the wind already draws for us.
The inquiry into unequal air pollution will be welcomed by all, since the truly poor can now look forward to equality of investigation rather than equality of breath.
When I walk through a poor quarter I notice I have never once stopped to ask whether the air tasted different than in my own street, which says more about the observer than the air.
Do not attack the pollution; attack the road that carries it - the lorry route, the zoning map, the warehouse permit - for the enemy is not the smoke but the arrangement that steers the smoke toward those who cannot move.
We once insisted that lying-in women died of miasma rather than admit the physician's own hands carried the fever, and now we insist the poor sicken from their own habits rather than admit the physician's city carries the smoke.
What inquiry is required to establish that a child in a low-income ward draws more poison into her lungs than a child a mile away - and how long must she continue breathing while the appropriate form is completed?
The mechanism is plain: the factory owner pays for the chimney and not for the smoke, so the cost of the smoke is deposited in the lungs of those who did not contract for it, and the market has disposed of it efficiently - to the poor.
They will convene the inquiry, the inquiry will recommend, the recommendation will be noted, the air will remain, and everyone will agree that this time it is being handled - the audience is sufficient; the room is sealed.
We could electrify every lorry route and every school heating plant and clean every chimney in three years, and we don't, and the distance between those two facts is the entire subject of the inquiry that has not yet been convened.
Give me the postcode-by-postcode readings and I can run the sequence: correlate income decile against particulate concentration, hold the weather constant, and the machine will show whether we are measuring air or measuring poverty through air.
Show me the record: which streets return the highest counts, what rents are paid there, who lives there, and who owns the chimneys - and the word 'unequal' will stop being an adjective and become a name, date, and address.