While poverty and pollution are bad for anyone’s health, they’re much tougher on children from poor families, as all social and environmental troubles are. But just because a family lives in a low-income community that suffers in baffling ways from pollution doesn’t mean their kids are ill-treated and unloved.
When we read headlines that tell us our state “ranks at the bottom of the country for child wellbeing,” along with the desperately poor states of Mississippi and Louisiana, it’s not hard to feel that desperately poor New Mexico is somehow being morally indicted for lack of empathy and responsibility, that we’re being blamed for not fighting hard enough against forces beyond our control.
Such implications don’t match reality. Child advocacy organizations like New Mexico Appleseed, a “poverty advocacy lab,” and many others, are battling a wide range of social injustices including food insecurity, a terrible and chronic situation that one out of every three of New Mexico’s kids struggles with every day. Appleseed was part of a successful effort in 2017 to make New Mexico the first state to outlaw the despicable practice known as “lunch shaming,” where a poor child is publicly ridiculed for their parents being in debt for their school lunches.
If you’ve lived here a while, it’s self-evident that New Mexicans of all classes and cultures dote on their children, cherish them and take vast pride in them. Rich or poor, New Mexico is a child-loving place. And that’s what makes our poverty and our pollution so terrible to bear. These insidious scourges worry us all. New Mexico Voices for Children reports that hunger and food insecurity even plagues undergraduate college students in our state, some 26% percent of whom come from “households earning incomes at or below the poverty line.” But some 70% of college undergrads are also “non-traditional.” Thirty seven percent of them have “experienced food insecurity in the last 30 days,” Voices for Children reports.
As if our poverty wasn’t burden enough, children in the most environmentally compromised areas in our state — Las Cruces, Albuquerque, Los Alamos, Española, Carlsbad and Grants — suffer physical maladies caused by air and water pollution.
A research team from the University of New Mexico has recently conducted a pioneering study that links “industrial air pollution to the state’s above-average rates of babies born with low birthweight.” UNM Newsroom reports that “babies born with weights less than 5lbs 8 ounces can face a host of health challenges and increased risk for chronic health problems” like diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, developmental disabilities, and metabolic syndromes “later in life,” as well as eye diseases and breathing difficulties while they are still babies. UNM’s study was published recently in the Journal of Environmental Management.
The study is one of the first I know of that associates New Mexico’s status as an environmental sacrifice zone with our struggles to come to grips with the reality of our abysmal national rankings in “child wellbeing” and what they imply. The study examined the “relationship between industrial emissions that mothers were exposed to at their residential locations while pregnant and the weight of their babies at birth. The emissions include chemicals like benzene, chlorine, ethylbenzene and styrene. “Each of the pollutants is the result of industrial operations and the researchers found that the closer pregnant people lived to facilities generating those pollutants, the more likely they were to have a baby with low birthweight,” UNM Newsroom said. Some of the researchers are conducting studies now that “focus on industrial air pollution and cancer rates in New Mexico.”
New Mexicans concerned about the health of their children have been waiting for decades for such a study. They know from experience what researchers at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), for instance, have concluded from a survey of 174 studies — that pollution is not only associated with poverty but that it is implicated in many childhood cancers, which are a “leading cause of death around the world.” These childhood cancers include leukemia, brain and other central nervous system cancers, and blood and eye cancers. Over 280,000 childhood cancers are reported worldwide each year. The NLM estimates there will be some 14 million new cases between 2020 and 2050. Undoubtedly, New Mexico’s children of poverty, and others, will suffer from this affliction.
Families struggling with poverty know that economic vulnerability, ill health, and pollution tend to be intertwined. According to Science Direct, air pollution even “heightens household vulnerability to poverty. This effect stems from air pollution lowering incomes and increasing healthcare burden[s].” Poverty and pollution are mutually reinforcing miseries. It seems clear they must be attacked together if child wellbeing in New Mexico is to be meaningfully improved.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Our children our our greatest treasure. If we don’t prioritize their health and wellbeing, learning and creativity, we have no viable future. Once again, you are telling it like it is and it behooves each of us to do what we can to give New Mexico’s children the chance they deserve.