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A 'SMOG' Life & Death Story

Local to State to National to Global -- and Back

SJS/Siterunner: The X-ray that the Congressman showed me was that of a child who had grown up in Los Angeles in the 1950s when the air was at its worst. The X-Ray was 'postmortem', the child had died and now the after death examination was displaying the causes of death.

Now let me go back to the Schwinn and another memory.

The X-ray George showed me in his office. It left a strong imprint on my consciousness as a kid growing up in the worst years of LA smog. I had asthma as did many kids and the X-ray was of a kid's lungs, after death. The impairment, the darkness, was evident and George carried on that day, the trained engineer that he was, talking about how 'we' needed to clean the air up, to make LA a model, California a model of what could happen if the people protected the kids. I don't remember all the details of his plan, but I remember the X-ray.

The plan did come into focus in the following years. What George later began to explain was how the air "in the LA basin" was stagnant, the cars from the post-war boom were pumping gases, pollution, into the air and, as the suburbs grew in a way that was unequaled in the world at the time, the air pollution grew as quickly. The cars, those 'muscle cars' with 'Holly 4-barrel carbs' were the most visible 'culprits' but all the cars were pumping gases into the air. The new freeways, highways, roads being built throughout Southern California were the talk of the town and the country, but the consequences were DIRT in LUNGS and the kids and their health were suffering.

Congressman George Brown decided to fix the problem, to put it in simple terms. And with other leaders in the fight for kids, health, breathing and better air, the Clean Air Act of 1970 and a host of solutions came into existence.

Take a look back at some of George's work at the frontlines of environmental protection...

In many ways as a green movement was created, our goal became protecting life.

The environmental work of Californians and those who supported the pioneering (life-supporting) air quality/clean air work would go from California regulations to Federal laws and regulations, and on to cities/nations of around the world as the model 'green best practices' were used to jump start other polluted air regions.

The vision of these early 'clean air' next, as George E. Brown explained to GreenPolicy360's siterunner early on, also applied to the air quality "higher up" in the atmosphere. In the early 1970s, scientists were at work, with George and the oversight committee he had become key in 'moving 'n shaking', in the nation's and, as it were, the world's first national/global climate science studies.

From SMOG pollution to ATMOSPHERIC pollution, the trail is there for historians to see ... the low-atmosphere, the high-atmosphere, the consequences, dangers and threats, from breathing and health to climate change and threats to a thriving, living Earth.

The SMOG/clean up the air story is now half a century on --- and at GreenPolicy360 we are attempting to paint the picture of how the story has changed over the years.

GreenPolicy360: Connecting & sharing world changing stories

GreenPolicy360 journeys across 50+ years of the modern environmental movement

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• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Air_Pollution
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• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr
• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary

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• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Climate_Change
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