The Environment

Prior to even booking my flight, people warned me about two things I would have to prepare myself for in Athens. One, it was going to be bloody hot. Two, the pollution was unbearable.

The deteriorating air quality due to smog and CO2 pollution has been a concern for Athenians for several decades. Many factors contribute to this problem, smoking, brush fires that start up during the hot seasons in Attica, the lack of parkland and green spaces within the city etc. The biggest problem however, is the exhaust from vehicles. The thing about Athens is that parts of the city’s infrastructure have been the same layout since ancient times. This means that everyone wants to go to the same places at the same time and because of this, the city center gets congested with traffic very easily.

When I first came to Athens, I laughed when a Greek friend was able to quote statistics on how many Athenians (especially the old) die each year in the summer due to the pollution. But as cool May passed into to hot June and stifling July, there was a noticeable difference in air quality. By mid afternoon it gets difficult to breath and suddenly, those statistics didn’t look so hilarious anymore.

From what I see, the responses to this problem are varied: the public are concerned about their environment and want to see changes, but they depend on those changes to come from the government. The government is a sticky bureaucratic spider-web, where things are done very slowly if they are done at all. But since the 1990s there’s been a push to cleaning up the city and although, change has been painstakingly slow to come, I find the overall outcome admirable nonetheless.
What particularly impresses me is the intricate public transportation system that services not only the Athenians, but anyone living in the suburbs of Attica who commute into the city. First there are the buses (both inter-city and long distance), which are fast, efficient and reach every corner of the Grecian mainland. Some buses use natural gases while other known as ILPAP run using electricity. Next, there is ISAP, the clean electric railway, the Tram line that runs along the coast, again using electricity. There is also the incredibly fast and cheap Attiko Metro, which took a long time to construct because while digging, construction workers kept running into important archaeological finds. Some of these finds are now displayed behind beautiful glass cases in the metro station itself.

And so, bit by bit, the city of Athens is starting to repair itself. Over the next few decades, I believe the environment here will have healed considerably, and I hope I come back to see this living change.