WHY ARE DUST MASKS NORMAL BUT TREES AREN’T? THE IRONY OF URBAN LIFE

There’s something unsettling about how normal it’s become to wear a dust mask in a city street — and how unusual it still is to see a row of healthy trees.

We’ve adjusted quickly to the sight of people with their faces half-covered, weaving through traffic under skies the color of concrete. We wear masks not just for viruses, but for dust, smoke, and the slow burn of everyday pollution. And we don’t question it much. We’ve accepted it as the cost of modern life.

But trees? Shade? A patch of clean air? Those seem to belong to some other time — either the past, or a future too distant to imagine.

That’s the strange irony of urban life: we’ve normalized the symptoms, but we resist the cure.

Trees aren’t just ornamental. They are natural air purifiers, dust filters, shade-givers, and microclimate managers. A single mature tree can absorb nearly 50 pounds of carbon dioxide a year. It can lower local temperatures, reduce noise, and offer mental relief in ways no man-made structure can. And yet, when development plans are drawn up, trees are often the first to go — and rarely the first to return.

Instead, we buy air purifiers for our rooms and dust masks for our faces. We install green wallpapers on our screens while cutting down actual green outside our windows.

How did survival gear become more acceptable than living solutions?

The answer is complex — a mix of urban planning that prioritizes speed over sustainability, and a culture that responds to problems reactively, not preventively. Planting a tree takes years to show results. Buying a mask takes minutes.

But while masks may protect us from the air, trees protect the air itself. One is a personal filter. The other is a shared future.

There is a deeper cultural cost here too. As children grow up with masks as a normal accessory, but trees as an occasional exception, what kind of relationship with nature are we passing on? Will “clean air” be remembered as a luxury? Will future cities be places to endure, not belong?

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Urban forests, green corridors, roadside plantations — these aren’t naive ideas. They are proven, practical responses to pollution, heatwaves, and declining mental health. But they need space, time, and most importantly — priority.

We’ve normalized dust masks because we had no other choice. But it’s time to reimagine our choices.

Let’s make trees normal again — not rare, not symbolic, not decorative, but expected. As essential as clean water, as basic as a footpath. Because a city that needs masks to breathe isn’t a city that’s thriving.

And because every dust mask we wear is not just a sign of pollution — it’s a quiet question, hanging in the air: what did we let disappear?