THE buses that take our children to school should be safe places. But according to , a professor of environmental risk analysis and policy at Yale University, they are polluted by diesel exhausts.
Riding the buses with monitors, Wargo and his colleagues discovered that children were at 鈥渟ignificant risk鈥� from tiny particles of half-burnt diesel fuel sucked in through doors at bus stops or belched out by the bus in front. At its worst, when lines of idling buses dropped off and picked up students at schools, the pollution caused 鈥渁 burning sensation at the back of the throat鈥�, he says.
Wargo blames air pollution for the 74 per cent increase in asthma among young children in the US between 1980 and 1995. This is one of a series of well-sourced examples in Green Intelligence that Wargo gives in support of his contention that governments and regulatory agencies have failed to protect us from pollution.
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He also tells the story of how the world was deliberately deceived about the dangers of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s. The same trick has been played by the multinational pesticide industry with DDT and other chemicals, he says, and is now being tried by the plastics industry.
There is a pattern to this behaviour, which puts profits before human health and the environment, he argues, and it has to change. His arguments are empirical, scientifically literate and ultimately convincing because they are rooted in common sense. The result is a powerful indictment of a flawed system.
Yale University Press
