Mexico City     I’m not saying that air pollution has not gotten better in many parts of the United States, because it has.  I can remember the brown air from the inversions in Denver that hurt your eyes for days in the 1970s.  I can also remember visiting New York City in the same decade, when you blew your nose and the handkerchief turned black.  Admittedly, the current administration is taking extensive steps to turn back the clock, so air quality will likely now get worse, rather than continuing to get better.  These are real concerns for the communities where we live and even the homes we inhabit.

I read recently about work initiated in Chaing Mae, Thailand, where a man with some engineering and electronic tinkering background didn’t believe the air quality reports he was receiving and invented a small monitor that morphed into a company called AirGradient.  He was able to build one for about $50, which was “a fraction of the $30,000 sensors governments use.”  Subsequently, his company has developed a kit that those handy can built or a finished version, and sold 50,000 monitors in 85 countries.  Many communities had depended on information for more sophisticated monitors at US embassies in these countries, but this is yet another program on Trump’s cutting room floor.  Acting only days before this change, the Times reports, “AirGradient stepped in …to install monitors in schools across the country in partnership with UNICEF, helping teachers decide when air was too hazardous to hold classes.  It later offered to send free monitors to other cities where US sensors had been switched off.”

The air pollution is among the worst in the world in Delhi.  I always knew it was bad.  When I would jog, I would do so before dawn.  How bad was brought home to me early in our work there when a funder and friend was visiting to see our work, arriving a day before I was due, but was on a plane back to the US within 24 hours, because she literally couldn’t breathe.  Another man brought an air monitor back to Delhi from Beijing and working with Chinese developers ended up as Prana Air, a start-up that now sells air monitors.  Another community system using low-cost monitors has been created by Breathe London Network, that has become the model for cities from Jakarta to Rio de Janeiro.

None of these systems are perfect, nor should they replace top notch monitors by government agencies, but as governments, like the US, either refuse to monitor or make the data unavailable, these community and home-based systems do a job with sufficient accuracy to provide protection for people.  Some, like those deployed in Louisiana’s notorious “Cancer Alley,” dominated by chemical plants and oil refineries between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, have threatened industry and political power forcing reaction.

…recent laws in Louisiana and Kentucky prevent people from using data from low-cost sensors as evidence of violations of clean air laws, requiring them to use more expensive, federally approved equipment…. Community groups near the Mississippi River…responded with a lawsuit in May, arguing that Louisiana’s rule kept them from holding the government and corporations to account.

AirGradient’s monitors aren’t dirt cheap.  Their website offers kits for $138 and finished monitors for $230, so they aren’t for everyone, but still are reasonable enough that, where this is an issue, community organizations and their members could create their own self-protection networks to put pressure on local governments and industries.

Data doesn’t win campaigns.  People and their organizations do.  I can think of ACORN local community fights over the years against rendering plants in Sioux Falls, incinerators and grain elevators in New Orleans, coal, steel, and chemical plants in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and other states located in lower income areas where environmental justice was absent.  Monitors and data alone would have been worthless, but if we had had the data from our own monitors in many of those campaigns, it would have been a powerful weapon for our troops.

We need more community-based tools like these.