love is an iron lung

[the_siobhan]

One of the bad things I mentioned in my previous post has been struggling to deal with the barely translucent peanut butter-coloured substance that Toronto residents laughingly refer to as "air".

I knew it was bad. I went to Kingston for a weekend last summer, and it wasn't until I took three flights of stairs at a dead run that it clicked just how much of an impact it has on me to live in the smog belt every day.

All the places we visited on our recent road trip were either a)on the ocean, b)in the mountains or c)out in the middle of nowhere. For three weeks I never thought about breathing. When we got to Chicago, it was like hitting a brick wall. At one point I was genuinely wondering if I was going to just fall over from lack of oxygen. It was a fight to get myself to a place where I could sit down and by the time I made it there were black spots swimming in front of my eyes.

Since we got back into town I've been using my inhaler every day. I feel like I have a partially inflated balloon in my chest. I can see the constant haze if I look up at the Tower, and the air smells faintly like burnt plastic.

I love Toronto. There are a ton of reasons I want to stay here. (bcholmes being a rather obvious one.) But for the first time ever the_axel and I are talking about what the hell we are going to do if there isn't a major change in Canada's environmental policies in the next couple of years. It may very well mean being driven out of my home, whether I like it or not.

In the meantime, the biggest neighbourhood initiative going on right now in my area is coming from people who are pissed off because they might be losing their street parking.

It's enough to make me weep.

If I could catch my breath long enough.

Comments

[eveofdstruction.livejournal.com]

Wow. That *sucks*.

[the_axel]

Talking of which - I've e-mailed Giambrone telling him that I support the Lansdowne Renewal Project.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I can strongly relate to this. It blows me away every time I, for example, go camping. It's also a big reason why I can ride my bike from Toronto to Waterloo but it's a struggle to ride it to the waterfront and back, or during the worst days, to work and back.

[50-ft-queenie.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, that would be the project that all the Lansdowne residents north of College are up in arms about. Their main concern appears to be a lack of parking space.

I, for one, would love to see Lansdowne have less traffic.

[kat1031.livejournal.com]

Vegas is like that, as well. We've noticed how much it effects us, especially on days where the temperature is above the 90s and the smog really starts to cook. user coughs a lot when we're home. When we're out of town, the cough goes away.

Definitely time to leave this forsaken place. It's beautiful, but the climate is difficult enough without over a million people making it worse.

[girfan.livejournal.com]

I developed asthma after pneumonia (in 1992-Chicago) and all it took was a year in the rural Cotswolds to make it go away.

Doesn't Toronto have any cycling initiatives? A push for more/better public transport?

[megiddo-lj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've noticed the air here does bad things to my asthma as well. It's like being back in Jersey.

[ash-pixie.livejournal.com]

If I go home for a few days to Chatham and then come back, the smog kills me for at least a week. I've missed work due to pollution sickness from doing manual labour on bad air days. The only thing that tends to save me in the summer--believe it or not--is running a humidifier in my room for an hour every evening.

I wish that the Gov't and other people would take this shit seriously, I really really do.

[mr-sharkey.livejournal.com]

Good for you - I'd contact him, but I don't live in Ward 18.

Has anyone else noted that the sign campaign on Lansdowne appears to be orchestrated? All the signs are in the same hand, and manufactured in the same way. I'm curious about who owns the houses the signs are on - when the Spadina renewal was proposed, it was opposed by the 'Spadina Residents Association' - three businesses who foudn it convenient to have their delivery trucks do illegal U-turns on Spadina. I wonder if any such similar grass-roots astroturfing is going on here.

M.

[http://users.livejournal.com/cincinnatus_c_/]

A caveat: Toronto's "air quality index" is not necessarily worse than most other places in southern Ontario. For instance, Kingston's AQI has been in the "moderate" range 19 times in 2007 (as of June 12) and in the "poor" range 3 times; downtown Toronto's has been moderate 16 times and poor twice, western Toronto has been moderate 18 times and poor twice, eastern Toronto: 16 and 2, northern Toronto: 18 and 2. Chatham has been moderate 23 times and poor 4 times. Kitchener: 22 and 4. Brantford: 28 and 4. (It looks like the winner for poor air in Ontario may be Port Stanley with 6 poor days so far.)

This is handy for this stuff:
http://www.airqualityontario.com/

Another caveat: Toronto looks "smoggy" a lot because the cool air from the lake produces haze on hot days. That may help to show up suspended particulate in the air, but it doesn't necessarily mean there's more of it, and suspended particulate isn't usually the main culprit on "smog days" anyway; invisible ozone is. (On the other hand, inversions in the atmosphere (warm layer above cool layer, preventing atmospheric lift) due to cool air moving in off the lake can help to trap pollution close to the ground in Toronto--same thing for other lake-side or sea-side cities.)

A third caveat: I don't really know what I'm talking about. ;)

One guess I have is that a lot of what makes breathing difficult in places like Toronto is dust, which may be too local and/or coarse to show up as particulate in the air quality readings. The accumulated winter grime from the streets is still blowing around in K-W; it was really bad in Saskatoon, because there are still piles of sand lying around on their streets from the winter. I wonder how much of the tremendous amount of salt Toronto puts on its streets in the winter ends up in people's lungs in the spring.

[razorjak.livejournal.com]

What is really scary? I've always commented on how CLEAN the air was in Toronto compared to Buffalo.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Your theory about particulate matter like salt makes a lot of sense to me - I'm not allergic to pollen, but I'll get wheezy if there is a lot of it in the air because it's just so much load for my crap lungs to deal with.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Starting to, but it's a slow process. We have a huge population of commuters (both in and out of the city) and the the city counsellors from the boroughs hate any initiative that looks like it might force people out of their cars.

We also have a city that can't afford to do anything without provincial and/or federal money, and there is a huge perception in the rest of the country that Toronto is somehow "spoiled" and shouldn't get any more "handouts". (Never mind that we are also the largest revenue generator in the country.)

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

There is one person on the local neighbourhood mailing lists who never posts about anything else. But she re-posts her rants about the initiative everywhere she can.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

I used to know what I was talking about - I was doing a PhD in atmospheric pollution, specifically lower troposphere stuff (the part of the atmosphere closest to the Earth's surface) before depression made my brain stop working. Everything you say seems to make sense based on what I can remember.

Your salt theory is fasinating - I'm curious to go and look it up in books, but I'm too stressed out and busy to do so now. You could try prodding me around the middle of July and see if I have enough spare brain to do it.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

The guy who is spear-heading the campaign is a Real Estate agent named Sam Galati (http://www.crworks.com/partner/c21fultonagent/about.asp?id_Person=51315).

He's created a group called the Toronto Lansdowne Residents Association (http://torontolansdowne.googlepages.com/home). They do not appear to have existed before all this started.