Tag Archives: air pollution

Air or Water? Living in Polluted Cities

When we moved into a 100-year-old bungalow in a lovely midwestern town, I was delighted.. The sun was brighter and the sky bluer than in the bustling post-industrial city where we used to live. That city was referred to as “the big dirty” by truckers. And the air was dirty, sometimes filthy, though the water, surprisingly, was very good.

In fact, the air used to be very bad there. Black smoke puffed out of the factory stacks and it looked like burning hell from the highway. Before Nixon founded the EPA in 1970 (I know: Nixon), there was no regulation of air or water pollution. An elderly scientist told me stories about the bad quality of the air when he was growing up: black smuts on the sidewalks, front stoops, walls, drapes, and rugs. It was a housewife’s nightmare.

But now things are better. Not great, mind you, but the EPA and other environmental agencies have cleaned things up quite a bit. Their job is to enforce regulations, not to eradicate pollution, but they do their best. One Saturday, four of us, two men and two women, drove over a bumpy back road to examine the smoke and emissions from a steel mill.

Well, honestly, Lulu and I listened to the radio while the guys read smoke, estimated emissions. and did their thing. “Is this legal?” I asked. I worried that we were trespassing.

Lulu sighed. “They can’t go anywhere without reading smoke. It’s such a drag, but you’ll get used to it.”

Finally both of us got fed up listening to the radio. Lulu stuck her head out of the window and said, “If you don’t drive us out of here NOW, we’ll walk to the factory and call a taxi.”

I could picture Lulu in her heels and me in my sandals crunching and wobbling over the gravel.

And so they drove us reluctantly to a shop in a tourist area that sold objects made or food grown in the state. I bought some maple syrup. Lulu bought a gift basket. And it was a relief to do something pleasant after our smoky ride.

Later, I had an opportunity to tour a steel factory. I had to wear a hard hat. Much to my surprise, it was a beautiful, if terrifying, process, with flames flickering high and iron melting into steel. My guide explained the process, but I’m hazy about it, and took no notes. But I did make me realize that these factories make one-third of the world’s steel and provide jobs.

The city where we live has good air, bad water. It has few factories, but there is agricultural run-off. In some parts of the state, the water is unpotable. For instance, my dad always took bottled water out of the refrigerator for us.

“The water is not too good here,” he said apologetically.

It startled me that the water would be so polluted in such a tiny town. But it’s not surprising, after all, because it is surrounded by farms: there is agricultural run-off, nitrates, sediment, pesticides, and waste. Sometimes it even poisons the ground water.

I don’t want to moralize, but there is no place on Earth free from pollution. I wish stronger measures were taken to battle pollution. For the Earth, yes?

On the Lake: City Air & Reading at the Beach

In our twenties, we moved to a city by a lake. The lake was dead, or perhaps in the final stages of reincarnation. The river was so polluted that it was legendary. And the city was the subject of jokes on late-night TV, which left the residents chronically depressed .

It was a bit like living in one of Elizabeth Gaskell’s factory novels. The air was hazy and the sky a dismal gray, but we tried to ignore the ring of factories around the city. We ignored the stacks, which emitted smoke and particulate matter. The Clean Air Act in 1970 had lessened the pollution, but it was still an environmentalist’s nightmare. It infected lungs with asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, and cancer. URBAN LEGEND: there was an exceptionally high incidence of cancer in the city. Still, an elderly friend told us that the air used to be much dirtier, that his mother had to clean smuts off the door, windows, steps, and curtains, sometimes twice a day.

In the epic poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Lucretius explains physics, the swerve of indestructible atoms, and Epicurean philosophy. I can’t help but think that if he lived today he would love the excitement of doom. He would write with gusto about the nature of particulate matter and air pollution, perhaps as an addendum to his intellectual epic.

Okay, so the lake was dead and the air was polluted. We still had the scruffy urban park. There were dead fish on the beach, but we sat far away from the water. A few mad men and women splashed around in the lake, which seemed unwise. If we got to the beach early enough, we could luxuriate on the sand and read the newspaper in peace, or the Village Voice, which truly had the best book review section.

But it could be noisy on weekends. That’s because people would bring their boomboxes and blast them at nine in the m0rning. Once I was utterly absorbed in Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer, the first of a quartet of lyrical literary SF novels, when R.E.M. (the best disbanded rock band in the world) nearly broke my eardrums with one of my favorite songs played at top volume:

Let’s play Twister, let’s play Risk
Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah
I’ll see you in Heaven if you make the list
Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah

And then Tears for Fears:

In violent times
You shouldn’t have to sell your soul
In black and white
They really, really ought to know

I felt intense exasperation. “Let’s move up the hill.”

“It will be crowded.”

The hill was pleasantly populated with picnic tables and trees. There was usually room for readers. Not today. Groups of people in too-revealing swimsuits crowded the picnic tables, snapping open cans of beer, grilling chicken, and listening to terrible music = so bad I could not identify it..

We were much better off with R.E.M. and Tears for Fears!

We strongly felt it was our park, though, because we lived nearby. When we sat under a tree, it was our tree. We sat under a tree on the edge of the parking lot -hardly ideal – and read happily enough for half an hour…

And then- oh no- Queen. Déjà vu: a neighbor had driven us insane playing this song over and over:

We are the champions, my friends
And we’ll keep on fighting till the end
We are the champions
We are the champions
No time for losers
‘Cause we are the champions of the World

And this is why people read at home!

Deep Breathing, Dystopian Classics, and Obama’s Letter to Librarians

I’m breathing smoke from Canada and coughing. I tell myself, “Stay calm.” I sit down on a tree lawn and riffle through my bag to find my inhaler. It is buried under a small notebook, a paperback mystery, and a wad of Kleenex.

One walker slows down and asks if I need help. “Or are you vaping?”

“It’s for allergies, “I explain.

The plastic inhaler resembles a Pez dispenser, but instead of Pez it emits puffs of albuteral sulfate. It was prescribed for my new allergies to dust, smoke, pollen, and the unhealthy particulate matter caused by air pollution this summer.

I wonder how many of us are breathless in this new, quasi-post-Covid, wildfire-riddled world. Some of us may have long Covid; all of us are breathing more particulate matter from the wildfire smoke. And we also inhale generous amounts of microplastics (little plastic bits) daily. “There’s a great future in plastics,” Benjamin was advised in the 1967 film The Graduate.

Information from scientists, the writer Bill McKibbon, the Sierra Club, and countless other environmentalists is ignored or met with delaying tactics. And because of the negligence of corporations and politiicans, we are living in the worst possible future: a dystopia where burning fossil fuels controls the earth, raises the temperatures, and burns the planet down.

And so we turn to dystopian novels, because science fiction writers speak the unspeakable and suggest alternatives – and most do scientific research before they write. Here is my personal Dystopia 101 syllabus (I have reviewed most of these here): John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, Margret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock, Richard Powers’s The Overstory, Karin Boye’s Callocain, T. C. Boyle’s Blue Skies, John Christopher’s The Death of Grass, and Orwell’s 1984.

Of course not everyone has access to these books. That is another problem. And a growing number of mad book-banning groups are challenging books chosen by librarians and teachers, insisting that such tomes will corrupt their progeny. They campaign against classics like To Kill a Mockingbird, biographies of Democrats, and Y.A. fiction with LGBTQ themes. Whether they have read these books is another issue.

Fortunately, President Obama is a hero. He has written a brilliant, articulate open letter to librarians on the importance of providing books that introduce readers to a variety of ideas.

Here is the link to Obama’s letter.