By Aliyah Difia Rahma and Tonje Brennsaeter
Sean Maguire is the Strategic Partnerships & Communications Director at the Clean Air Fund, a philanthropic organisation that supports and funds partners to create a future where everyone breathes clean air. Maguire started this job three years ago and had worked on some climate issues before.
“The more I learned about the Clean Air Fund and what it was trying to do, the more interested and motivated I became,” he told a group of students gathered together to discuss environmental issues as part of the Dirty London Journalism Newsweek.
“There are many reasons to work on it and I personally find it fascinating to learn more about the science and to understand how it impacts our health and the different ways it to an extent damages human health.
“I was also fascinated to learn that by acting on air quality you can mitigate climate change very effectively because the causes of air pollution and climate change are very often the same. It largely comes down to burning fossil fuels.”
When asked what Maguire found most challenging about his job, he said; “ One of the challenges about working on air pollution is that you think that it should be obvious that people should act in actual fact the ways our economies are built, the ways we run our lives.Talking to people about cutting energy use or changing the type of energy use, reducing fossil fuel use, reducing car use, changing types of cars. That’s hard to do when progress doesn’t happen, that can feel frustrating. ”
When asked how he was reaching people who aren’t specifically interested in participating in bettering the polluted air, Maguire replied with; “ Talk to them about human life lost and ill health, impacts on them, impacts on their family, provide a human example. I think the human story and making individual to people and making it about people who are close to them is probably the most promising way. It’s hard to have an individual story for all 8 billion people on the planet. You have to find ways to try to take individual stories and make them applicable. Feel applicable, feel personal and relevant to each individual and that’s hard to do because people live in different contexts and countries and many people don’t have the luxury of choices around how they live their lives, how they cook, how they heat, how they travel. They do what they can afford to do.”
Worked as a journalist
Tips on how to help in tackling the air pollution
Before Maguire started his job working for the Clean Air Fund, he was a journalist. Being a journalist brought him to work around the globe, leading journalists worldwide on various issues such as politics and climate change. He worked as a field reporter in the Middle East and former Yugoslavia, and was also based in Poland.
“My journalistic training was the best preparation one could imagine for working on social change and sustainability issues,” he told students.
“I learned in journalism how to take a whole bunch of information, analyse it very quickly, cut through a cloud of information and get to the point. The real core of an issue and then articulate what you want to say about that very sharply.”
Why did he change jobs? As he says on the Clean Air Fund website: “Because mountain air tastes so sweet and street air smells so sour. It doesn’t have to be that bad. Let’s change it!”
Every little helps
What can individuals do to help tackle air pollution? There is a lot we can do, and every little step forward makes a difference, the panellists said.
“Look at the way we travel, public transport rather than private transport. If you need to have a car can you use your car less, can you consider shifting to an electric car if you can afford that,” he said.
“Can you use less energy generally? How often do you travel, can you travel less? Can you take a train rather than a plane?”
Listen to what Sean has to say here:
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