A World Without Sunsets

We had a beautiful sunset this evening. The sun was a vivid gold, dying the clouds, sending beams of light up into the sky.
When I was at the nature program last week, the instructor told me a story.
A while ago, there were three Chinese girls in a program he was part of. The whole time, they were on their cell phones, not appreciating nature at all, even though that's what their program was about.
Finally at the end, Sundara took them on a walk up the hill, just before sunset. He blindfolded them and lead them up the hill. Then just as the sunset was approaching its most brilliant, he took off their blindfolds.
The girls all gasped and stared open-mouthed at the sunset before them.
And for several minutes, they were speechless and riveted to the scene before them. They remained there until the sun was gone.
Sundara was a bit confused about how entranced they were. It was definitely a beautiful sunset, but not many people would be so absorbed into a sunset as these girls were.
It turns out that these girls had never seen a sunset before.
They were from Beijing, where the sky is so dirty that bright sunsets don't happen, apparently.

I knew Beijing had dirty sky, but to think that people there have gone their entire lives without seeing a sunset is shocking to me.
And Beijing is not the only place with bad air...
This is the kind of world we live in. A world where thousands, or millions, of people live without sunsets.
This is the world I want to change. Because everyone should be able to watch the sun set and the sky turn to fire and gold.