"This past winter, I played the role of reluctant shut-in. I was recovering from a health calamity which forced me to spend my days working from a sofa in my den. I had never spent so much time inside my home—a 131-year-old, two-and-a-half-bedroom, fourth-floor apartment in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill Historic District. I live here with my three children, and we consider ourselves lucky to have nine windows on three exposures. I feel less lucky about the constant hum of the six-lane Brooklyn Queens Expressway one block away, or the hiss of the old-fashioned steam heat system.
I also suffer from a perennial sinus infection that usually shows up during February or March, then blossoms into a full upper respiratory infection before the grand finale: situational asthma that requires two different inhalers; prednisone; and during one particularly bad bout, a nebulizer at urgent care. I wasn’t sure when my yearly scourge would make its appearance, but I was certain it would be soon. ...
Not too long ago, our outdoor air was deadly. On Thanksgiving Day in 1966, a thick toxic smog covered New York City, and about 200 people died from inhaling it. After the passage of the Clean Air Act and creation of the Environmental Protection Act in 1970, our air has improved. However, the current administration continues to roll back those emission-curbing protections, and for the first time in four decades, there’s been a 15 percent increase in unhealthy or hazardous outdoor air quality in the United States.
|  | Remembering a City Where the Smog Could KillWith the future of the E.P.A. now in doubt, it’s worth recalling what New York City was like before the agency a... |
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Add to that the effects of climate change, like the wildfires in California, and staying indoors is often the only means of keeping our lungs safe. The environment that has the greatest impact on our health, the one where we spend up to 90 percent of our days, is mostly unregulated and often makes us sick." |  | California’s Wildfires Are the Doom of Our Own MakingCondé Nast The state is being squeezed by uber-wildfires and rising seas—climate change’s twin agents of chaos. It’s a stru... |
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