What is in our air?
We need to know what we are breathing in
WILL A cancer registry finally prove that the air being taken in does lead to cancer?
These are some of the questions Durban residents want answers to, as delayed investigations, broken equipment and legalities hold up the release of information about what is being emitted, and possibly affecting their health.
In recent weeks, a fire that raged for days in Durban, smelly air in the Upper West region and cellphone towers in the suburbs have made headlines – with residents fighting for a cleaner environment.
This week was lauded as a great week for civil society and the green activists, when residents succeeded in their bid to temporarily halt operations at the Shongweni landfill site, and the Western Cape courts ruled the country’s nuclear deals with countries such as Russia to be unlawful.
“We live in the information age. Nothing can be classified confidential. Information must be instantly available, and it can spread rapidly,” said Professor Rajen Naidoo of UKZN’s occupational and environmental health department.
“There is a responsibility on authorities to make information available to people that is easy to understand and for people to take the action needed to protect themselves or make their voices heard.
“If a community is asking, for example, for air quality details to be disclosed, then they should be, especially if it can impact on their health, so that the person is armed with the knowledge to make decisions.”
Community activist Desmond D’Sa said while the country found itself in a twime of crisis, it was up to civil society to plug the gaps. “We are the ones who have to do something. We can’t wait for others. The recent environmental wins have vindicated our collective work in calling for justice.”
PRECISELY a week ago, an utterly bizarre and wretched event occurred. Scientists in more than 600 cities around the world, including Durban, took to the streets in a “March for Science”.
The objective was to bring the importance of science to the attention of politicians and the populace.
The march was bizarre in that it was unprecedented, and occurred not in the Dark Ages, but an era distinguished by scientific achievement. It was wretched, because it highlighted the failure of modern science education – science illiterates, unable to appreciate the consequences of their ignorance, currently govern the world – hence the march.
While scientists were marching, citizens were engaged with public administrators about issues affecting their well-being.
The issues of concern are the same everywhere.
The effects of chemical pollution on human health, the supply of food and water, the proliferation of diseases affecting humans and domestic animals, infrastructural and socio-economic problems and war. These are all problems amenable to scientific analysis and solution.
Atmospheric pollution in several South African cities is severe and brings the issue of science and society into sharp focus. The recent claims and counter claims surrounding the Shongweni landfill is a case in point.
The Shongweni problem is in essence a simple problem. Determination of the nature and source of atmospheric pollutants requires deployment of a reasonably high number of sensors for specific gases located at strategic places.
The commercially available equipment to detect and monitor gases in the field is expensive, so only a few people have access to it.
In this we have a perfect example of precisely how science education has failed society.
Any high school science pupil should be capable of building and calibrating a wide range of sensors to monitor practically anything. Many do.
The sensors are cheap and readily available, and calibration involves elementary physics and chemistry. However, knowledge of how to obtain and construct sensors and calibrate them is scarce.
Enter the Open Society and Makers. A classic example of how individuals can influence education and human well-being in an open society is to be found in the development and use of the Raspberry Pi – the world’s cheapest and fastest-selling computer (a board sells for about R600 in South Africa).
About 10 years ago, six senior people involved in computing in Britain realised that young people entering the computer industry, in common with many fields, were incompetent.
Analysis persuaded the six that the primary problem was that children at high schools did not understand what made electronic equipment work, mainly because it was too expensive to pull apart and nothing could be reprogrammed.
As a solution, the six developed an inexpensive, high performance computer, the Raspberry Pi, that they provided to schools.
An NGO was created to provide free resources to facilitate learning about computing and interfacing computers and other electronic components.
At the time, a cheap open source programmable microcontroller, the Arduino, that can be used to build practically anything electronic, including sensors, was also available.
The combination of the Arduino and Raspberry Pi has enabled thousands of schoolchildren around the world to learn about electronics.
It has also illustrated the ability of young people to learn well beyond the expectations of their teachers.
In building environmental sensors, young people not only learn about electronics, but also about how the natural world works.
The Raspberry Pi Weather Stations for Schools program has taught thousands of young people about electronics, but also about climatology, geography, biology, mathematics, physics and chemistry.
At the same time that the Raspberwry Pi and Arduinos were developing, the phenomenon of Makers and Makerspaces that use open source hardware and software was emerging globally.
Makerspaces are places where people with shared interest can gather to learn, create, invent, tinker, explore, discover and cooperate in making things.
The rental of space and expensive equipment such as laser cutters, 3-D printers, electronic controllers, power tools, and libraries, are financed from funds provided by everyone who uses the space.
In Makerspaces people engage in anything and everything creative from growing food, printing shirts and making jewellery to building drones, robots and rockets to developing the internet-of-things.
Magazines and books is published by the Make organisation and circulated worldwide.
Many cities have Makerspaces, and schools, colleges and universities are adopting the concept because of its strength as a learning environment.
Durban has one (www.themakerspace.co.za, 083 612 2125), and several schools are exploring their creation.
The range of open source programmable microcontrollers and microcomputers is growing, so in addition to Arduinos and Raspberry Pis we have BeagleBone Blacks, Galileos and Edsons.
Together with hardware, the availability of open source software is exploding. In many fields open source outperforms the commercial counterparts. The Open Data movement is also growing. Many large corporations recognise the merit of posing research problems to interested creative minds with prizes for individuals or teams that provide the best solution, instead of paying for in-house research and development and protection from industrial espionage.
Researchers frequently publish data on which written articles are based.
Remotely-sensed data from satellites and aircraft that measure huge arrays of environmental variables is freely available.
Phenomena such as WikiLeaks are growing. Only governments and other archaic institutions persist with notions of the importance of secrecy.
Access to Makerspaces, open source hardware and software and data has resulted in a massive surge in citizen science. For example, recording of weather data by private automatic weather stations linked to the weather underground now outstrips government-owned facilities, and the data provides better forecasts.
Monitoring of environmental contamination must follow.
Society has a simple choice. Either improve the quality of science education massively and rapidly for all ages, or suffer the consequences – a depleted quality of life for billions of people. Ignorance has consequences.
Perhaps Shongweni will provide the impetus.
Access to Makerspaces, open source hardware and software and data has resulted in a massive surge in citizen science