By Joy Williams / Environmental Health Coalition
As a kid growing up in the LA air basin during the smoggy 50s and 60s, I thought of irritated eyes and a sore chest as normal parts of life. The sky on hot summer afternoons was a brownish yellow shade, and the air sometimes made your eyes water. In my later childhood years, I came to view air pollution as a symbol of how radically alienated from nature Southern California life was; as I thought of it in apocalyptic, if poetic, terms, we had poisoned heaven. Later, in college, I learned to think in more analytical, and hopeful, ways — smog could be analyzed, understood and to a large extent, controlled. The ochre-brown color came from nitrogen oxides; the lung-damaging substance was ozone.
Particulates added a hazy quality. It wasn’t an amorphous cloud of human failure hanging over our cities, it was a specific set of pollutants with knowable causes and controls. If you increased the fuel efficiency of cars and added on catalytic converters, the air quality got better. And the photochemical smog picture of SoCal actually has improved since the 60s. [Read more…]