Air in the New Normal
Thirty years ago when I used to travel to Mexico City on business, I can remember the difference between the normal days and the days when the air miraculously cleared and you would see the lovely distant mountains that surround the D.F. (As it is called). I don’t know the percentages of normal smoggy days and crisp, clear, high-visibility days, but I bet there were not more than one in ten days when the city smog alerts went silent. This really struck me because by then Los Angeles and other big U.S. cities had already seen improvements in smog levels thanks to attention by the EPA around issues like the use of catalytic converters and mandated and lowered average emissions from Detroit. We had made a mess of some of our prettiest cities, so we attacked the problem as we needed to, with passion and intelligent solutions. What the U. S. has done around insuring clean waterways and skies when they put their mind to it is a true model of effectiveness. Some places like Mexico weren’t ready, in terms of their development cycle, to get serious and prioritize clean air and waterways. By the way, note that I’m not inclined to say clean water due to our little Flint, Michigan problem, where I am inclined to say clean waterways based on rivers like the Cuyahoga and Hudson and the marked improvements in their conditions. At that time, while China was clearly gearing up its industrial production, it wasn’t really on our screens as a place that was busy choking and effectively poisoning its own population for the sake of becoming a global economic powerhouse. My visit to Beijing in 2014 confirmed two things to me, first that the air in that city was largely unbreathable and second, that the country had woken up to its problem and was doing everything it could to address and rectify the problem it had allowed to be created.
This morning I am looking out at a grand vista. It’s the same old mountains to the distant north with rocky chaparral hillsides in the foreground. It’s the same old rolling hills with scattered hilltop homes between here and the Westward view of the broad and blue Pacific Ocean. And it’s the same old Eastern sunrise into the clear and unsquinting vastness of the desert beyond. What’s not the same is that I am in Mexico City on that one day in ten here on this hilltop in San Diego. It is a glorious, clear, high-visibility day with air so clear I want to rush outside to fill my lungs with it and relish its life-giving greatness. What’s different is that there is no ground haze of smog between me and all these wonderful horizons and that reminds me that there is great beauty in a world devoid of air pollution.
When I was a kid living in Madison, Wisconsin, we lived in a little cracker box two-bedroom 800 square foot tract home (I often say it was the prototype house that we all learned to draw as children with a pitched roof, a door, two windows and a chimney). It was set in a development that must have been a landfill of some sort because our back yard ended with a grand sweeping slope of grass (there were very few trees in 1960 housing tracts…they just got in the way of progress I guess) that ran down to a highway called University Avenue. That was a very appropriate name since my mother was there to go to the sprawling University of Wisconsin to do her graduate work in adult education. All we knew as trailing children was that we had moved from the tropics of Costa Rica to the biter cold of the northern Midwest (the land where ice fishing started in November) and that the path led to the University of Wisconsin. The point of that slope and that highway was that my friends and I found it a perfect spot to take crab apples from the one tree that existed up on that hilltop, place them on the end of a three foot switch of applewood and whip hurl them off the hilltop, down the slope and at passing cars, in the hope of perfecting our aim to the point of actually hitting a passing car. That was great sport to a seven year old trained in the martial arts of avoiding tropical snakes and hand-slicing sugar cane stalks.
That act of defiance may have just been good hunting sport to a worldly suburbanite seven year old, but as I think back at it, it was a symbolic defiance that I’m sure I had no idea was a railing against the internal combustion beasts that hurtled past our little house, heading to the better world of higher education. Wow, if I had only been prescient enough and educated enough to understand that the icon of American progress, the Oldsmobile four-door sedan, was the very instrument of our demise, I might have tried to hurl more than crab apples at them. It was those Detroit heavy-metal gas guzzlers, the same ones that took up page after page of Life and Look magazines cayolin-glossed pages, that were befouling our air when we didn’t know what was what about air pollution. Now we know and now we all drive EV’s instead…sometimes.
You cannot throw a crab apple off a slope at passing cars in San Diego without hitting a Tesla. They are everywhere with their run-silent, run-fast electric engines designed by a guy named Elon Musk. I wonder if the Sloan School at MIT (the business school named for the Sloan that built General Motors) will rename itself the Musk School of Business when it gets the chance? Meanwhile, as we Tesla into our future, our air is, once again getting polluted right before our eyes. It is most visible on days like this when it is, indeed, not visible. It’s on days of great clarity (now that is a metaphor I didn’t see coming at me) that we understand that our Western skies are getting mucked up by smoke from wildfires out here. Luckily they are wildfires mostly to the north this year. I am not so naive as to think we cannot see that change to wildfires down south near us next year. The point is that these wildfires, being brought on by climate change and the depletion of our ozone layer from years of “progress” have forever changed the quality of our air. I just hope we can defeat that monster the way Tesla has helped to defeat our last monster. I know we have a new normal, I just want there to be air in our new normal.