A good friend of mine from Boulder called last night, and she mentioned at one point in the conversation that Texas had been in the news a lot in a "bad way." "Something to do with really bad air quality and environmental performance," she said.
It was refreshing talking to Carol and having the topic of environmentalism come up in conversation. It's a subject I'm passionate about. But it is easy to ignore it living here in Texas. After all, this is the land that brother oil built.
I live and work out in the country an hour from the city partly because, since moving to Texas, I've developed both allergies and asthma. When you can't breathe, it's a problem. A few years ago I worked at an ad agency three days a week in the heart of Dallas -- trendy uptown, right on McKinney. The cable car went by all day long full of mostly tourists going to the Hard Rock. Anyway, once in a while, we would walk to lunch somewhere more than a few blocks away. On 100 degree days, that usually triggered an afternoon asthma attack.
My doctor told me that going back and forth between the smog-filled air of Dallas and the intense forests and lushness of east Texas was troubling my lungs, which, she said, had become a tighter mesh from living at altitude for more than 15 years. Basically in east Texas you have three seasons, she had said, "Fall, Winter, and Allergy Season." Couple that with Dallas' putrid air quality, and you have a recipe for disaster.
So for the last several years I have mostly avoided Dallas on high pollution days, working from home more. At really bad allergy times, like the last four days for me, I either try to travel out of town (Vegas is always a good escape from blooming things) or stay pretty doped up on over-the-counter allergy meds. This means I'm only able to work in brief spurts of clarity, and I have to surrounder to the couch (on Sunday I did for the entire day).
More than once this week my kids has asked, "Mom, are you going to be okay?" "I'm fine," I tell them in my whispy, nasally voice, even though I do not feel fine. I'm on medication, and I feel like I'm walking around in a fuzzy bubble.
Yesterday I had been walking all over the Fort Worth Club trying to find an elevator that would take me to my car, and just as I found my car my phone rang. "Hello," I had answered. "Are you okay? You're breathing heavy!" My friend said, alarmed. "I'm fine," I had wheezed.
But I'm not fine. A few weeks out of the year I suffer a lot with breathing troubles. It really puts my focus on air quality. What if everyone in the world had the trouble I have, not just a few weeks a year, but all the time? Could it get that bad? Are we heading in that direction?
I have to listen to what my friend said about "bad news on the environmental front" in Texas. Our air quality everywhere is really important, because air doesn't stop at state boundaries. If we're screwing up our air here in Texas, we're screwing up the air in Oklahoma and Arkansas, and New Mexico, and Mexico...we're screwing it up for everyone. It doesn't matter if Coloradans do what they can do if we're going to send our stinky Texas air up toward the Rockies. If I lived in Colorado, I'd be pissed.
On an individual front, we have to do what we can do. This summer I'm not going to drive un-necessarily. My next car will be a hybrid. And I'm going to raise my kids to respect the environment and conserve. I know there's lots more that I can do and I'm going to give this a lot more thought... I hope that you will too.
1 comment:
Great work.
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