Life Quality Alert
What “Living Conditions” Really Are
I work in health science, and we are often using the term “living conditions” in our work to talk about how healthy or unhealthy a person’s living environment is, a.k.a. how quality their shelter is, how safe and nurturing it is, how loving it is. That shelter can be a house or an apartment, a shack or a tent, a commercial alley or a highway overpass. There are more types of human living conditions than any one person can imagine. There are also so many aspects of quality that condition them.
This is in part because, even as we think of our living conditions—something as basic as our shelter—as a bounded thing, in the domain of health science, research has shown that those conditions aren’t really bounded at all. Our dwellings are just an inert casing for our lives.
They are dynamic spaces in which our dynamic brains and bodies, and most importantly dynamic identities and life stories, emerge. Though we have doorways, windows, and sometimes garages and gates too, there is no real boundary that is definitive of our living conditions. Our dwellings are nested in dynamic socioeconomic conditions, such as what materials we can afford, what measures of security we can take, and what amount of peace and sanctity we have the privilege to create. There are conditions of our conditions and conditions of those conditions beyond.
Conditions for Living
“ If we as a society have already failed them in terms of the basics then what will happen when these major climate shocks befall us? How can their growing bodies weather the storm and avoid being fatally weathered by it?”
In health science, we also pay mind to how there are basic conditions for living that every single human on Earth needs. My kids have a book that talks about what living conditions our food needs to grow: a place with sunlight, nutritious soil, clean water, and clean air. I use this book to get us thinking about the health science principle. We reflect together on how humans need those things too. Animals and not just plants. All of us and not just some of us.
In recent days, the air quality alerts have also been a springboard for us to discuss these matters and they have been a great way to zoom out to that issue of life quality/inequality too. Just as with COVID and the onset of the pandemic, which exposed the vulnerability of all and yet the greater vulnerability of some, the wildfires in Canada that have been polluting the air along the Eastern seaboard have made these interlocking conditions clear. We could not avoid contaminated air then and we cannot avoid it now. Doors and windows leak. Garages and gates must be opened. The air out there is there air in here. That’s the quality end of the story.
Yet, just as with COVID, we are also seeing that quality cannot be measured without also measuring inequality. There are some of us poised to protect ourselves and some of us who have little to no way to shield ourselves and our children from harm. The other night, before putting our kids to bed, Nick and I had to stop up the doors and tape up the windows so that polluted air wouldn’t beset our whole house. Our house is old and drafty and we don’t have a centralized system to purify our air or protect us. We had to make the difficult call of which of our kids’ bedrooms to install our one fan. As they are all just healing from respiratory illnesses and infections, it was a hard call. And yet we are relatively privileged. We have a fan and we have adequate shelter. We have a stock of N-95s to send them to school with and we can pick them up right after it and ferry them home.
In the wee hours of the night, I tended to my youngest who didn’t get the fan, and I smelled smoke in his hair. It made me think of how other kids are faring today. Some of our children’s friends have asthma and other chronic respiratory illnesses. Do they have fans? Do they have masks? I also thought about the millions of youth without homes in this area. If we as a society have already failed them in terms of the basics then what will happen when these major climate shocks befall us? How can their growing bodies weather the storm and avoid being fatally weathered by it?