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Breathe, Breathe in the Air, Don't Be Afraid to Care
By
Joshua Citrak
As
early as 1998 scientists had documented the migration of pollution to the United States from China, now the world’s largest contributor to air pollution in the form of mico-particles, aerosols, and mercury.
This constant stream of dust and soot, nicknamed the ‘Asian Express’, is at its worse in the spring, when the occurrence of dust storms in Mongolian and Upper Chinese deserts is at its height. These dust storms are partially a natural occurrence, however, they have been exacerbated by decades of desertification.
Desertification describes a process of making once fertile soil arid, often a result of poor farming practices, overgrazing, clear cutting forests and soil destruction. As these dust storms pick up speed, they act like a sponge, absorbing smog and other chemical pollutants, carrying them across the breadth of China, the Sea of Japan and onto the Pacific heading straight for the West Coast.
Desertification affects one in four acres in China. Recent census states that there are 100 million peasant farmers trying to etch out a living in a collapsing environment, through years of mismanagement, and a growing strain to produce food to feed China’s soaring population. This, coupled with an energy crisis that struggles to keep up with the rising modernization, the infamous Three Gorges Dam, and a ‘laizze faire’ American foreign policy, spells out looming environmental concerns for us living in the Bay Area.
I’ve always been one to scoff at the doom-sayers, the environmentalists that use fear as their main tactic for motivation. However, the facts don’t lie. As we in the Bay Area, growing evermore concerned with the quality of our own air, try legislating tougher standards for polluting vehicles and corporations, we must now realize that at least thirty percent of our polluted air is no longer something we can control.
An ACE ( Aerosol Characterization Experiment), running for the past six years, has documented and charted yearly dust and micro-particle migration from the South of China across the Pacific to the Bay Area and the West. Much of the micro-particles and aerosols have been long associated as weather changing- affecting yearly temperatures and annual rainfall.
Mercury in the Bay has also long been a major concern. The California Department of Fish and Game deems the Bay one of seven California bodies of water where no fish should be eaten from. Our gold mining past has been attributed to large deposits of the poisonous metal, in which mercury was used in the smelting process. Now, however, a recent University of California Santa Cruz study has shown that the Bay is once again absorbing more mercury that it can handle and that which can be cleaned efficiently by human sources.
This study, which consisted of sampling rain water from the Santa Cruz coast and comparing it with water sampled on the Bay side of the Santa Cruz Mountains has shown researchers two things. Firstly, that rain coming directly off the Pacific has three times the natural, pre-industrial level of mercury. And secondly, the inland samples contained 44 percent more pollutants- at a distance of less than thirty miles away.
This enormous jump in mercury levels has led scientists to one conclusion- mercury, in its elemental form does not wash away into rain water, it needs to be oxidized and positively charged from other elements in the atmosphere. That missing element is ozone, produced right here in the Bay Area, mixing with the mercury imported from China, creating a deadly chemical cocktail.
It has long been known that China, careless with its own ecosystem and population has been a major violator, second only to the U.S., of world air quality standards. Seventy percent of the energy in China is produced by burning coal. Coal, once burned is a major source of airborne mercury. However, what is now known, according to the World Bank, is that China is responsible for one third of all mercury contamination in the U.S., and out pollutes both North America and Europe.
China has admitted that it has no ‘clean’ solution to its energy crisis. They offer little money and no incentives for people who follow the rules and those who purchase less polluting modern equipment even as the Chinese have rapidly expanded their consumption of fossil fuels by a hundred million tons in two years- a number that is expected to double once again by 2020.
This is where we come in. By thrusting open China, predicted to be the largest consumer of American goods, exporting our own manufacturing jobs, where companies like IBM, HP, GE and others can do their bidding without having to deal with bothersome environmental regulations, we have inadvertently (?) screwed ourselves. It is predicted, in ten years, we in California will not be able to control our smog levels due to the fact that much of it, and at far less safer levels, will not be of our own making.
California state parks like Sequoia, Lassen and Joshua Tree are consistently deemed the dirtiest in air quality. In Sequoia alone, there are on average 59 days a year of unhealthy smog levels as compared with the LA basin’s nine days. Pesticides banned in the U.S. such as, DDT, toxaphene and dieldrin have consistently shown up in alpine lakes and other California watersheds- assumingly hitching a ride on the Asian Express, where all of the above chemicals are still widely used.
So pollution is a global problem. I’m sure you knew that already. We export our dirty air to Europe, who exports to Asia, who kindly gives back to us. Of course, we here in the U.S. and those in Europe are half-heartedly trying to do something about it- We’re exporting more of our jobs and companies to Asia, where the effects of their own pollution is a hundred times worse than what they send to us, so we don’t have to be bothered by it so much. This is a no win policy. We need to pressure our Senators, Congress-people and the President to revoke favored nation status to China and any other country that continues to ignore the devastation of its own land and peoples. But this is not going far enough. We also need to punish the companies, many of which are based right here in the U.S., that manufacture in Asia with little regard to pollutants.
In San Francisco, where we mercilessly blast SUV drivers for their gas-guzzling selfishness and vigorously defend our few remaining open wild spaces, it is terrible to know that we are quite helpless in the face of such corporate greed and governmental negligence. Our Bay and wetlands are teetering precariously on a see-saw of blight. We have done so much of late to protect and rebuild them. This, however is not a battle that we can legislate away, it is one that will be won with our wallets. By choosing to spend our money on products that are manufactured by environmentally sustainable practices is and will continue to be the most effect weapon in defense of our planet.
Nothing is ever forsaken.
Copyright © 2004 Joshua Citrak
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