I’m one of those immigrants who came to America as a refugee that you hear about. I was born in Naples and came over to the USA in 1946 as a very young child after World War II had pretty much made a mess of everything in Italy. We landed in New York City and I grew up learning about America the hard way. I noticed that things don’t happen by themselves, but if you get involved, good things can happen.
Eventually I ended up in Atlanta because I thought that my children might be able stay in the area after they left home as it was a growing city in a good climate. I started own business, which is one of the great freedoms in America. I enjoyed riding my bicycle in intown Atlanta where we decided to raise our family.
I didn’t realize I had a problem breathing until I was on a hike in North Georgia and had trouble keeping up with my friends. When I had to give up riding my bike, I knew I had more than a small problem and started looking for answers to why I was having so much trouble breathing whenever I exerted myself. I also discovered my need for clean air was very important as I noticed that I was having more trouble breathing on days when the pollution was reported as “not so good.”
That was about 20 years ago. It took several doctors to figure out what to call my breathing problem. The first doctor thought I had tuberculosis (TB) because I have a family history of it. (My grandfather was initially not let into this country because they thought he had TB.) When my TB test came back negative, my 2nd doctor decided I must have lung cancer and that a lung needed to be removed. While I was at Northside Hospital being prepped for surgery, one of my surgeons (who was from Costa Rica) recognized my problem wasn’t cancer after all! He cancelled the operation and saved my lung from being removed. I learned later on that removal of the “bad” lung would have made my condition much worse!
The surgeon had correctly diagnosed me as having stage 4 Sarcoidosis. I was told that there was no cure and that the causes of the disease are unknown. Upon reflection I believe that my grandfather and other relatives who were told they had TB very probably had Sarcoidosis rather than TB. I now have tremendous doctors and an excellent health care plan that has figured out how to best help me to keep my lungs stable.
About half of my lungs work, so you can see why I’m very sensitive to air pollution. My wife and I moved 30 miles west from Intown Atlanta to Douglas County because the air quality was is a lot better. But I miss being close to my kids and grandkids. It’s a 40-minute drive each way (without traffic) to visit them, but I can’t live much closer because I get a bad reaction from breathing the air in Atlanta for an extended period of time. Breathing is way at the top of my list of important things, yet I miss being closer to my son’s family.
After lots of research into the cause of Atlanta’s pollution I have concluded that we’re going to need several changes to get cleaner air.
- One idea is to use the power of Capitalism to explain the economic benefits we could have by preventing the health problems caused by polluted air. Since the costs of my health care and my lost days at work don’t get charged to the people who create the pollution (mostly large users of electricity and those who produce it) there is no economic incentive for them to offer cleaner energy. A lot of the reason for our high cost of health care is that government is failing to protect us from harmful actions that people who only looking at the “bottom line” would not care about.
- Another idea is political. Since energy producers are regulated by the public service commission and not the marketplace, we need to elect people who can understand that the financial spreadsheets they see do not include ALL the relevant costs to our community of the power they produce. We need regulations to protect our air quality that are enforced by agencies that are well funded and staffed by people with integrity.
- I also think that the health care system (doctors/nurses/health insurers?) should be rewarded for keeping us healthy and not just rewarded for curing us. That would mean they would be consulted when air quality is an issue and even serve as staff on the public service commission so that their wisdom and experience with the sufferers of air pollution have a voice in the decisions about how we produce energy.
- Consumers need to have more power by being informed about the products we use and how they are made. A pollution number could be created and added to the labels of the products we use so that we could make better decisions about what to buy and what to avoid, sort of like the miles per gallon measures that helped me to decide to buy a Prius in 2004. (It is also a “clean air vehicle”) .
- As an accountant and former accounting professor I know that if we don’t measure something that it doesn’t exist! We need to help people to better know what their air quality is wherever they are by creating and using handheld devices to gather and share data about air quality. This might be an app that would send data to an organization that could map the air quality on a real time basis. This might be the most important thing we can do, as knowledge is power.
Now that one of my grandsons has been diagnosed with asthma and I have heard about his many trips to the hospital, I feel even more effort is needed to find a way to improve the air quality in Atlanta and all of Georgia.
Thank you Mothers & Others for Clean Air and to the American Lung Association for letting me share my story. I hope that it encourages more people to work to end pollution and bring clean air to the places we live and work and play.
Written by Free Polazzo
