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A piece of cowboy logic goes: “Always drink upstream from the herd.”

Unfortunately, short of moving away or going to work elsewhere, for anyone living or working in or near the Industrial Heartland of Alberta there is no way to get upstream from the soiled environment and the dirty air that not all that many years ago were clean.

Another piece of cowboy logic goes: “If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing is to stop digging.”

It’s about time that we stop digging. Visible air pollution isn’t just something to gaze at.

• It is something you smell when you go outside, especially if there is no or little wind, and you wish you could go without breathing.
• It causes the paint on your car and on your house to fade and to become defective.
• It causes steel to rust and galvanized steel to lose its zinc-coating.
• It causes electric fences to lose their effectiveness. If you are a farmer and wonder why your electric fences don’t work as well as they did when you got them set up, you will get an explanation if you check the electrical conductivity of the zinc-oxide-coating your fence wires acquired in just a handful of years. You will find that your fence wires are now in effect insulated wires.
• It causes respiratory problems in children and the elderly.

The list goes on, and the problems will get worse [2] until things get to be as bad as they are now in China, and people here too die each year in numbers that can no longer be ignored.

We should stop digging now while we still can, so that we don’t have to dig graves when it’s much too early, while wishing we didn’t have to dig.