On January 20th, 2013, a friend of mine, +Pamela Barroso (Pam), from the Local Government Academy, invited me to go to Miller Gallery on CMU campus with her. Pam is a very active person who has many interests and a curiosity for a lot of things. Especially she has a great empathy for international student who live and try to start a life somewhere far away from their land of home.
Miller Gallery is about green, sustainable, and human-centered design in many arenas. Food and health issue were exhibited as the foundation of many discussions that triggered those designs in the gallery.
I was especially surprised by a map showing the air quality around the global (see below, the lighter the blue color is, the better the air quality is). America has become one of the two cleanest countries on the North America continent, if not in the world. At the same time, don’t forget before 1970s (since late 1800s), America was the dynamo of the world’s industrial production, among which Pittsburgh and its adjacent areas were the center of the center. In many media channels or poems, Pittsburgh once was referred to as “Smoky City” or “Living Hell” when the evening sky was lighted by those steel mills.
On the other hand, China has become the country where the air quality is ranked among the worst in the world. I worry for my parents, my family, and many other Chinese people breathing the air, especially those newly-born babies. Not too long ago, some news stuck me to the extreme, in Harbin, the capital city of Heilongjiang province where also is a concentration for China’s heavy industry, the smoke was so bad that the entire city was invisible to people living there anymore. At the same time, the officials claimed that the smoke was caused by the cold weather and special circumstances. Not a word about air pollution.
From the map we can see that as those heavy industries move outwards from China to other Asian and African countries, the air quality in those places would also gradually worsen. This is a theory of economic development that capital will direct itself to improve the infrastructure of those least developed places so that over time all places will be developed to a higher level than their original stage. Well, thinking of the air quality alone, I beg to differ. Too many discussions about where to develop, far less discussions about how to develop, let alone, to what extent development shall be purposefully constrained.
Beer winning trivia @ Air quality in Pittsburgh
1. Several authors referred Pittsburgh once as a “Living Hell” and the poem often used for this comparison was Dante’s Inferno. Dante’s Inferno, widely hailed as one of the great classics of Western literature, details Dante’s journey through the nine circles of hell. The voyage begins during Easter week in the year 1300, the descent through Hell starting on Good Friday. After meeting his guide, the eminent Roman poet Virgil, in a mythical dark wood, the two poets begin their descent through a baleful world of doleful shades, horrifying tortures, and unending lamentation. I remember when I was reading the Divine Comedy; In Hell, the most dominant feeling was misery and pain. In the Inferno, it was fighting, struggling, and in Heaven it was a striking sense of newborn. The light from the Divine blacked out all the pain, misery, and struggling only leaving a pure sense of being. For some reason, I feel Pittsburgh’s industrial history and modern transformation fits this comedy very appropriately.
2. Air quality in Pittsburgh has had a dramatic improvement since earning the name of the “Smoky City,” complete with pollution levels that killed people and turned daytime black. Average soot pollution has dropped by about a third at monitors around Allegheny County from 2000 to 2011. By 2014, Allegheny County projects it will meet federal clean-air standards for the first time since their 1997 creation. But the county's forecasts are just that. They rely on business trends and certain rules that are in flux. During an air quality conference held in May 2013 in Pittsburgh, scientists showed some concerns that the air quality in Pittsburgh is still risky and may have potentially contributed to low birth weights, early deliveries, cancer risks, heart and lung diseases, and etc. In a nutshell, we still have much work to do as a community. [thanks to Timothy Puko’s media press on TribLive for the conference.]
Your ID @ Air quality, Miller Gallery
1. You can check your local air quality index through this website and find out Pittsburgh area or other region’s air quality.
2. Who is the creator behind the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University?
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