Clean Air, Sure, But Not During Fire Season

That Santa Fe has relatively clean air is pretty obvious to anyone who bothers to look around. That the city is among the top 10 urban areas with the cleanest air on the planet, however, seems a little surprising — especially since our nearest competitors on the list, compiled by the World Health Organization, seem to be mostly smallish towns in the vast (and relatively unpopulated) Canadian Northwest.

Still, we’ll take good news wherever we find it. Particulates can cause heart disease, lung cancer, asthma and respiratory infections, and the number of premature deaths from such problems has risen since 2004, according to WHO.

The health organization recommends that for the good health of citizenry, cities’ particulate air pollution shouldn’t surpass 20 micrograms per cubic meter. Santa Fe has six micrograms of tiny, breathable particulates per cubic meter, on average. Contrast that with 18 micrograms in Washington, D.C., 23 micrograms in Tokyo or 38 micrograms in the City of Light, Paris.

The four Canadian cities with cleaner air than Santa Fe, incidentally, are tiny — Whitehorse, capital of the Yukon Territory, has only 21,000 people compared with Santa Fe’s 60,000-plus. Likewise Clearlake, Calif., near Santa Fe in the clean air sweepstakes, has a population of under 20,000.

State Environment Department officials credit Santa Fe’s relatively small size (compared with world capitals like Paris and Tokyo) — as well as its non-manufacturing economy — as the most significant contributors to the city’s clean air.

Then there’s the lucky circumstance that prevailing wind currents don’t bring particulate pollution from the state’s dirtiest areas — oil and gas facilities in northwest and southeast, not to mention the notorious coal-burning Four Corners power plant — toward Santa Fe.

Santa Fe isn’t a transportation hub, either — and even with our habitual reliance on wood-burning during the winter, the city doesn’t suffer from the “brown cloud” syndrome that afflicts neighboring Albuquerque during the cold season’s high-pressure inversions.

All this notwithstanding, we’ve got a couple of questions about the WHO ratings. There’s no evidence, for example, that WHO was interested in radionuclides — the bugaboo of environmental worry-warts obsessing over the City Different’s proximity to Los Alamos and its nuclear laboratory.

Then there’s the fact that the particulates measured for the air quality rankings were 10 micrometers of less in size — teeny-tiny, in other words. But what about those giant flakes of ash from the Las Conchas Fire that fell all over Santa Fe in late June? Or the subsequent smoky pall that enveloped northern New Mexico and even southern Colorado for the best part of the following month?

All we can surmise is that, luckily for Santa Fe, WHO must have been measuring air quality during some time other than the wildfire season.