Chinese Haze

I saw an advertisement the other day for one of those “news” stories about the “Haze” aka pollution in China. Because of the Olympics most of us have heard something about this problem of server pollution in China. I was not able to watch the program advertised but the ad got me thinking about our own “haze” problem. As many of you are aware we visited the Grand Canyon last summer- the Grand Canyon has a “haze” problem also. If you are like I was and you have never visited the Grand Canyon before you my just think the haze is just fog, but I learned while visiting the canyon that the haze is actually pollution. Somewhere at the canyon I saw a photo from many years before and one from now and one from sometime in between. There is a noticeable difference in the comparison.
When we returned from the Arizona, we visited my husband’s great aunt and cousins. We brought along an album of our trip, and they pulled out their slides from their trips. You could see that the haze was worse in our pictures. I believe they had visited the Grand Canyon 7 total times, and you could see haze progressively worsen from year to year. Even in the much older faded photos the view across the canyon was clearer than in our photos. If I had not learned about the pollution problem I may have assumed we had visited when the pollen was worse, or it was dustier, more humid or something. I might have just thought they had a better camera.
It is too bad that the world including China has not learned from our pollution problems and they are making the same mistakes we made. Their mistakes seem even worse than ours because when the serious pollution started here we did not know any better but they do. Now there is tons of evidence on the ill effects of pollution now and the technology has been developed to lessen the problem. It is a shame that China does not take advantage of this information to prevent the problems that others have encountered. China has put on this extravagant show for the Olympics perhaps to show off how great they are. But in my opinion instead of showing us their greatness they have ignored history and drawn attention to their inability learn from world around them. Again China seems to have shown us how isolationism is bad for a people and the world. We should learn from them.
I wonder- are we contributing to the Chinese pollution problem by sending so much of our manufacturing to China? Why can they produce products so much cheaper even with shipping from so far away? Is one reason that we do not hold their factories to the same pollution standard as ours? Perhaps we don’t care if the Chinese people are sick as long as our goods are cheap. Have we forgotten history as well? What will it take for us to care? Will their acid rain have to fall on us before we care?
O. K. that is enough rant for now.