Air Pollution Nationwide - Recent estimates show more than 100 million Americans breathe polluted air in major cities across America. Air pollution increases lung cancer, asthma and injects tiny particles coated with chemicals into human beings’ bodies. Pregnant women breathe poison air into their fetuses’ delicate and developing tissue. Many other health consequences cascade from air pollution. 

Every day in America (on average):

* 40,000 people miss school or work due to asthma.
* 30,000 people have an asthma attack.
* 5,000 people visit the emergency room due to asthma.
* 1,000 people are admitted to the hospital due to asthma.
* 11 people die from asthma.
* An estimated 20 million Americans suffer from asthma (1 in 15 Americans), and 50% of asthma cases “allergic-asthma.” The prevalence of asthma has been increasing since the early 1980s across all age, sex and racial groups.
* Asthma is the most common chronic condition among children.
* Asthma is more common among adult women than adult men.
* Asthma is more common among male children than female children.
* Asthma is more common among children than adults.
* The annual cost of asthma is estimated to be $18 billion.
* 400,000 Americans die of lung cancer annually.

Data source: Center for Disease Control, Atlanta, GA.

If you live in Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Houston and other large cities, you can ‘see’ the air you’re breathing. It’s brown, yellow or tan in color. It shifts in layers over the skyline. Tall smoke-stacks belch unending streams of poisons from power plants—diesel trucks spew polluting toxic smoke ribbons along the expressways—cars by the millions emit tons of particulate into the air. Millions of homes burn wood, oil and natural gas that exhausts into air over our cities. Sewer systems spew toxic air into our clean environment.

Do you smoke tobacco products? Why? Why not? Whether you do or not, if you live in a large city, you smoke the equivalent of a pack of cancer producing cigarettes every 24 hours each “red-warning” day. Your children absorb the same toxins with every breath of their young lives. Your health stands at risk with every breath—because you breathe thousands of toxic particles every day.

The “red-warning” flag flies scores of days during the October through April period, typically.

During the many “temperature-inversion days”—one of the worst things you can do, coming into Denver from the mountains on I-70, is see the “brown soup” that you are about to breathe. When I come back home from a weekend in the pristine air of the Rockies, I’m sickened that I’m back to breathing that toxic air with every breath I take.

Can it get worse?

You bet! Denver expects to add 2 to 3 million more people in 33 years as the rest of the country adds 100 million people by 2040. Some experts tell us those numbers are much higher.

Last week in Denver, Colorado, air quality monitors registered 74 micrograms per cubic meter of particulate — the highest ever recorded for dirty air over in the metro area.

As Denver’s Rocky Mountain News journalist Todd Hartman reported, “Dirty air over the metro area could linger into today, prolonging a stretch of toxic pollution that has prompted warnings even for healthy people. Air monitors have recorded unprecedented levels of particulates—this is gritty air.”

Colorado regulator Mike Silverstein, at the state health department said, “We are praying for winds.” Winds from the west tend to sweep the pollution toward the east.

What happens when those winds blow air pollution out of our cities? It falls as acid rain on the land, in our lakes and into our rivers. It poisons the earth and water. It creates havoc with nitrogen-fixing-bacteria in our top-soil. It kills entire fish populations in lakes and rivers. It kills trees and native vegetation by changing their soil PH balance. It’s insidious, deadly and growing worse. And worst of all, it often finds a route to other nations.

What are we doing about air pollution?

As a result of expensive clean-up actions by industry, emissions have been reduced – but the awkward and unplanned growth whelms clean-up efforts. Lacking an overall strategic growth-plan, pollution pockets arise overnight.

In the next 33 years, we’re adding 100 million people who will add up to 100 million more cars, trucks, planes and trains to the mix. We’ll add at least 40 million homes, thousands of schools, malls, firehouses, sewage treatment plants, commercial businesses, power plants and more air pollution generating facilities. We’ll add millions of miles of roads, cut down millions of trees, and pave-over millions of acres of beautiful open-space lands – some of which give us the vegetables we need every day.

Our breathing-oxygen comes from the green plants we destroy both on the land and phytoplankons in the oceans.

How many other physical health consequences do we suffer—as human beings do their best to live in air polluted cities? How about eye irritation? How about toxic heavy metals and nasty chemicals transported to our brain tissue – carried by the oxygen to the otherwise life-giving cells in our lungs. How about birth defects caused to children? How about long-term effects on plant and animal life downstream from air polluted cities?

Willy-Nilly Population Growth Continues – Unchecked.

Does it occur to anyone that we create tomorrow’s unfathomable consequences for future generations by our irrational population growth? Even if we mandated zero population growth in the United States today—by shutting down all immigration, our own population momentum adds 30 million people to this country in the three-generations born here by 2040. In other words, we’re placing future generations into a no-win situation.

As I sit here after researching material for this column; as I’m writing this information for the public; as I look back on my world travels having already seen what’s coming, I’m laughing hysterically out of frustration. Sacrilege !

Do you hear the Dirge?

I feel like I’m laughing at my own civilization’s funeral – in effect, laughing at my own child’s funeral. Unfortunately, that next added 100 million Americans is NOT a laughing matter. Our civilization stands frozen on the tracks – ironically bewildered—in the headlights of a runaway population freight train of our own making.

Copyright ©2007 Frosty Wooldridge All Rights Reserved