Bogotá’s Plume of Pollutants

Guest Post by John Michael

When I think about the air that our ancestors must have breathed during the Paleolithic, I imagine that it was relatively pristine and healthy, with the exception of those times when natural disasters like volcanoes or wildfires filled the atmosphere with noxious fumes; but events like these were not the rule, I imagine, and our ancestors no doubt regularly partook of an air that left them feeling healthier with each breath, and from which they had little to fear.

Such is not the case for me these days. I currently find myself living in Bogotá, the densely populated urban metropolis that serves as the capital of Colombia, and which, with over eight million inhabitants, contains a whopping seventeen percent of the country’s population. A large number of Bogotá’s inhabitants moved to the city as refugees, being displaced from their homes by Colombia’s seemingly interminable civil war, which has been fought for the past forty-seven years. This rapid and disorderly exodus from the countryside has caused unregulated housing to sprout up throughout the city. Locals know these provisional neighborhoods as casas o barrios de invasion, or, “invasive homes or neighborhoods,” in which basic amenities like running water and sewers are absent, and in which the inhabitants live in frightening poverty. This sudden and haphazard increase in size has led to multiple problems for the city, with the most ever-present and irritating of these being for myself the horrible quality of its air.

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