This topic connects to many others (climate change, water quality, soil quality, human health, etc).
The first and most obvious effect of air pollution is that bad air can hurt our health.
When we burn chemicals, fossil fuels, etc, those chemicals get into the air. And from the air, they can get into eyes and lungs, on our skin, etc.
There's a reason so many city kids have been getting asthma recently. It's because the air in cities can be really disgusting. Bad air concentrates in certain areas, especially cities, because of all the exhaust from vehicles, factories, power plants, etc. Beijing seems to be the famous example. An example that I have seen myself. There are tons of photos of people in face masks, walking through what looks like smoke. It's not smoke. It's the air they breathe most of the year.
When I first stepped out of the airport in Beijing, I could smell it. You cannot see the sky. Above you is just gray. And when you're driving down the highway, the buildings on the side of the road are hazy.
Here's a couple pictures I took while I was there. The birds nest and the water cube - two awesome buildings that were built for the Beijing olympics.
I wrote this story already, but someone told me how he had a group of girls from Beijing in one of his classes. One day they hiked up a hill to watch a sunset, and they were astounded. Because it was the first sunset they had ever seen. The sky where they grew up is too polluted for people to see sunsets.
Beijing is not the only city like this. It is the only one I've ever visited though.
Some places are more prone to air pollution than others. Places that are situated in lower areas (a valley, between cliffs, ex) can hold onto the bad air. It sits, trapped inside the high borders around the city.
Bad air isn't just bad for humans. It's bad for the planet, and everything that lives on it.
And here, we actually have a success story.
The ozone layer surrounds the planet and pretty keeps everything alive. For a while, we had some chemical aerosols that would make their way into the atmosphere and break apart the ozone layer. This was bad.
Really bad. There were holes in it, which were very damaging to the land and people who happened to live beneath the holes.
And you know what? There was a huge campaign to get rid of these aerosols, and it worked! The ozone layer has since been recovering. Which just proves that we can fix huge problems, if we only try.
Acid rain is another problem. This occurs when chemicals (for example, from burning coal) get into the atmosphere and then gets captured by the rain and dragged back down to the earth. Which is bad for humans, human structures, water, and soil.
Air quality can affect the soil in other ways. This example is specific to California. There is a type of habitat that is built off of serpentine soil. It is very rare habitat, and comes about because the soil in some areas is rich in a mineral called serpentine. Because of this unusual soil, there are a lot of unique species living in these strips of serpentine soil.
Unfortunately highways also run along some of these areas. The exhaust form the cars can actually reach the soil, and change the content of the soil. This changes what kind of plants are able to grow there. It is altering a very rare and fascinating habitat.
And finally, we have climate change. Which is something that will get its own post. I'll talk about here, in context of air pollution.
Global warming is caused when sunlight is locked inside the earth's atmosphere. This is a good thing. Without it, we would not be alive.
But when we mine fossil fuels, we are removing a source of carbon that has been stored for millions of years. When we burn those fuels, we are dramatically increasing the amount of carbon (and other chemicals) in the atmosphere. Life as we know it is not accustomed to these levels.
Carbon is a greenhouse gas (there are many others too, like methane, which comes from farming livestock, dumps, etc). Greenhouse gases hold heat pretty well (the amount of heat they hold varies). When the amount of greenhouse gases increases in the atmosphere, it catches more heat from the sun. Which leads to a changing climate all over the planet.
It's not always warmer (though on average around the globe, temperature is increasing). But it will be more extreme. Dry places will get drier, wet places will get wetter, storms will be much more devastating, etc.
How would you use this topic?
Some futuristic stories are set in worlds that have rampant climate change. This causes so many problems that it will give you plenty of conflict to work with (more about this on the climate change post).
Ship Breaker is one book that puts this to use.
There is also The Day After Tomorrow, which gives a disaster story of climate change.
Acid rain could pose a danger in your book (think of the falling "thread," in the Pern books).
Air pollution might be causing sickness.
Like the poor swomee-swans, choking on all the smog in The Lorax.
Or, to a more extreme level ,there are the toxic jungles, in Nausicaa. The poisons coming from these jungles is so intense that if you go near them without a mask, you will die.
No comments:
Post a Comment