Your success in life depends, in part, on the air your grandparents breathed
The intergenerational consequences of dirty air
We’re writing about dirty air this month at The Why Axis, and to kick it all off I want to introduce you to a study that blew my mind when I first stumbled upon it.
The study documents, in incredible detail, how the effects of polluted air can ripple across generations: it’s not just the air you breathe, or the air your parents breathed — the pollutants in the air during your grandparents’ childbearing years have a measurable impact on the life you lead today. That finding stems from a heroic effort to merge individual-level Census data with historic data from air quality monitors going all the way back to the 1960s.