Ecology: Menace in the Skies

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Extreme air pollution again darkened London in 1956, killing 1,000, and in 1962, claiming more than 300 lives. In 1953, a ten-day temperature inversion over New York City trapped so much air pollution that 200 excess deaths were attributed to the smog by Dr. Leonard Greenburg, then New York's commissioner of air pollution. Another New York smog in 1963 killed more than 400, and there were 80 excess deaths recorded in New York during a four-day siege over the last Thanksgiving Day weekend. Scientists suspect that thousands of deaths each year in cities all over the world can be linked to air pollution. Says U.S. Assistant Surgeon General Dr. Richard Prindle: "It's already happening. Deaths are occurring now. We already have episodes in which pollution kills people. And as we build up, we're going to have an increasing frequency of episodes."

"Take a Deep Breath." Such warnings, added to the widely publicized New York and Los Angeles air-pollution alerts and open bickering between politicians and industry over pollution controls, have made the U.S. suddenly aware that smog is a real and present danger. The belching smokestacks that long symbolized prosperity have now become a source of irritation; the foul air that had come to be accepted as an inevitable part of city living has suddenly become intolerable. "Tomorrow morning when you get up," reads a recent magazine ad placed by New York's Citizens for Clean Air, Inc., "take a nice deep breath. It'll make you feel rotten." Indeed, as the adjoining color pages show, the U.S. city dweller had only to look at his skyline last week to see the startling and ominous inroads that smog has made.

Air pollution has become a worldwide preoccupation. Some 230 miles southwest of Tokyo, for example, school yards in the port city of Yokkaichi are filled with children running and playing games. But their shouts and laughter are muffled by yellow masks impregnated with chemicals to protect them against air polluted by nearby petrochemical plants. In Tokyo, where smog warnings were issued on 154 days last year, policemen in ten heavily polluted districts return to the station house to breathe pure oxygen after each half-hour stint on traffic duty in order to counteract the effects of breathing excessive amounts of carbon monoxide.

"Sitting on the hill of Lycabettus, overlooking the valley of Athens," writes Greek City Planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis, "I can see early Monday morning the first dark clouds building in the lower part of the valley, where the industries are. It grows, it covers the middle and lower parts of the city. Gradually it reaches the eastern part, and by expanding in height it covers the rock of the Acropolis and the Parthenon. By then everybody in the city of Athens has had to breathe the polluted air."