My latest diversion is the Netflix series The Crown.
A ten-episode series launched online this month, The Crown focuses on the United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth II and the Royal household members, staff, nobility, and politicians who surrounded her at the start of her marriage in the 1940s and the earliest years of her reign in the 1950s.
This weekend, I watched an episode on a near-apocalyptic dense smog that covered London for four days in December 1952. Winston Churchill was still prime minister, and thousands of people died from suffocation, lung infections, and exposure to sulfur dioxide.
Though the British government passed a major Clean Air Act four years later and began shifting urban homes from smoke-based heating to electricity and gas, The Crown‘s writers point out how the “Great Smog” had such dire effects on London because politicians like Churchill had failed to act years before.
London’s fogs and smogs are part of what have long set it apart in histories and literature, but I grew up in the city decades after smoke-limiting and clean air regulations had taken effect. I couldn’t see many stars at night because of light pollution, but I also didn’t have the pestilence of smoke and soot exposure that people who lived in the shade of tooting chimneys and active factory smokestacks once did.
The episode reminded me that every political delay on environmental clean-up has a cost. Not everyone pays it straightaway or in the same ways. The poor, the elderly, and the socially vulnerable will pay it. The wealthy and healthy might stave off the worst impacts upfront or find ways to work around them.
In every instance, however, there are solutions that would resolve those impacts for everyone, and decision-makers choose to minimize the stakes and not pursue solutions until people, perhaps thousands of people and perhaps more, have already begun to pay the costs. As humans we don’t seem to move until there’s blood on the ground, and as long as it’s not our blood, we’re all too willing to deny or defer.
Local environmental justice organizations like UPROSE Brooklyn actively work against this pattern for communities in New York City living adjacent to industrial plants. Organizations like 350.org work against it on national and global climate issues.
Each of these collectives is an attempt to breach the patterns of omission and delay that require some people to accept displacement or diseases that the rest of us would never tolerate for ourselves. They’re an attempt to lead from below when top-down leadership has already failed.
Mostly, they’re examples of ways we can take action that benefits the whole, not just the segments of society that look like us.