Other writing

On a dusty patch of ground beneath a concrete overpass, about a hundred children, the sons and daughters of rickshaw drivers and farm laborers, sit cross-legged on dirty mats, in bare feet or flip-flops, learning their letters and numbers—and the basics of environmental protection.

MYSLOWICE, Poland — The children Karolina Zolna knows huff and puff after a few minutes of exercise. Two years ago, her infant daughter spent four months in the hospital with pneumonia. The doctors did not identify a cause, but to Ms. Zolna, the reason for the baby’s illness was obvious.

A family living in the middle of an eight-lane motorway, an autorickshaw driver struggling to breathe, a young woman who can’t wait to leave ... the foul air of India’s capital affects all sections of society.

SHAFTER, Calif. — On a map he keeps in his office, Tom Frantz, an environmental activist and retired math teacher, notes a spot near his home that he says is within a five-mile radius of 10 big dairy farms and about 60,000 cows. This town, in the very fertile but poor and badly polluted San Joaquin Valley in California, is near the heart of dairy country in a state that produces 20 percent of America’s milk.

A lot has changed in Ethiopia since hundreds of thousands of people died in the famine of the mid-1980s. Rates of undernourishment have plummeted in the past 25 years, child mortality is down by two-thirds and 90 percent of children go to primary school.

A strange twist of circumstance and history has left grey, bustling Warsaw with far cleaner air than elegant Kraków – and created a potentially sizeable sustainability-plus in a nation more accustomed to being cast as the environmental laggard of Europe.