Yesterday, I decided to buy my own PM.2.5 air metric sampler and Ogawa Nox sampler. I thought it'd be easy. That's how the air pollution experts made it sound.
I'd simply buy a small contraption that captures fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, the stuff of illness, heart disease, and lung disease... so I've been told... and I'd compare this location to that.
Simple.
I'd get my friends together and we'd move from one home to another, and voila! we'd capture our air pollution profile.
Well, when I called Mr. Schaeffer of Ogawa sampler fame, (you've heard of them haven't you?) I learned these low cost easy to use monitors seem to work well but only for about one hour at a time. And they don't capture the increasingly famous, PM2.5 fine particulate matter... the stuff I really want to capture!
Why couldn't I just capture butterflies instead you might wonder?
I rarely see any.
But I do see thick black plumes of smoke coming from trucks and school buses.
Mr. Schaeffer recommended I talk to Mr. Steve Ferguson, a senior engineer at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Mr. Ferguson designs and builds air pollution monitors to help university researchers. I called him on the phone, and he was most relaxed and helpful.
The following aren't his exact words, but he told me in effect they make big fancy air pollution monitors, and he has done so for 27 years. When he asked me how much I wanted to spend, and I told him, he politely let me down but had much more to say.
Mr. Ferguson works with major universities such as the University of Toronto, where years back, they studied people jogging outdoors and learned jogging outside in air pollution had negative health impacts.
"Toronto?" I asked. "I thought Toronto was pretty clean."
"Compared to Los Angeles it's clean," Mr. Ferguson said. "If I were you, I'd leave L.A. as quickly as possible."
"Yes, I know."
He recounted a visit to Riverside years back, and how the smog covered the nearby mountains. He sounded saddened and somewhat surprised that people could live there.
He continued, "Toronto has pollution, too. And the university does a lot of air pollution experiments. Right now the university is building a machine (I believe he said with Harvard) that can recreate air pollution and then expose a lung or another body part to see the health effects."
Wow.
He explained even if I were to capture fine particulate matter, it's hard to know the toxicological effect of that particulate chemistry.
He's most concerned with VOCs (volatile organic compounds) in car fumes, and noted his concern for people with garages attached to their house--what else are they bringing in the house when arriving?
He made an interesting comment: It'd be interesting to study the health of truck drivers, since they breathe the most particulate matter. Poofs of diesel smoke from their smokestack frequently dump along the truck's surface, and behind the truck where the airflow is rough and turbulent. Trucks frequently follow one another in truck lanes so they'd breathe fine particulate matter the most.
As he spoke, I couldn't help but think of all the air pollution impacts conferences I've been to, the articles I've read and written, and wondered where is our behavior changing?
Where's the action in the clean air movement? Cleaner technologies are being created. How many of us are using them?
I hear talk, talk, talk.
And attend conferences people drive and fly too.
Tst. Tst.
And I think to myself:
Video-conferencing.
Web-conferencing.
Tele-conferencing.
Conference Calls.
And I say to the world: Let's stop talking so much and get into action.
But it's not easy when people are committed to old ways of doing things like driving unnecessary miles to get to a job that they could have done from home or from a satellite office in their own neighborhood.
When I hung up the phone from Mr. Ferguson, I had a vision of people required to work within one mile of their home.
And everyone who could, would take advantage of modern technology.
And corporations and government agencies would create incentives for employees to stay home.
And government agencies and corporate boards would rent satellite facilities for workers who live five minutes or more away from what I'll call their Mothership.
And I thought about that Mothership concept, and how as a society it must be redefined to an undefined place called Virtual Reality.
Where anywhere is here.
Everywhere is here.
Here is Virtual Reality.
I just wrote these words in virtual reality, and you received them in virtual reality, and I believe, if you're not an auto mechanic or industrial engineer working to create the next air pollution gizmo, your next employee, contractual worker, or supplier can and should work in Virtual Reality. After all, that's what FEDEX, Tandberg, AOL, and Cingular -- Can you hear me? -- were made for.
Get people off the road.
Why not?
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