Just another orange sunset in Northern California, 7/31/08

Hip hip hooray! I’m breathing the sweetest natural perfume in the free world—unlimited internet access suffused with gardenia. My little potted plant just bloomed today. This courageous life form has elected to flower in spite of all the bad air it’s been breathing lately. Speaking of which, our pollution level for Friday morning is under 100! We’ve got a Beijing Blue Sky Day!

Sad to say, the rest of Siskiyou County is not so lucky. Reported levels are choking in at 176 (Yreka) and 179 (Fort Jones), or, well above Chinese safe.

Yesterday, I asked two people in Mount Shasta how they were coping with all the smoke? The first said nothing could be done, so she was ignoring it. The second said toxic vibrations from psychic sources were of more concern.

I figure both of these answers ring true enough. It’s just that on bad air days I have trouble ignoring what I’m breathing or even noticing the vibrations from psychic sources. When the Siskiyou County Air Pollution people advise me to lay low and quit taking deep breaths, I tend to get depressed. That’s why I’ve decided to go on an internet pilgrimage to collect some hope and enlightenment. See what you think:

Blue sky does not mean clean air. Our friends at Greenify Earth (who also like to breathe) define ozone as a colorless gas that can irritate the respiratory tract, produce impaired lung function and cause throat irritation, chest pain, cough, and lung inflammation. They also say that it is the most injurious pollutant to plant life.

Particulate matter, like that caused by wildfires, industrial processes, smelters, automobiles, woodsmoke, construction, road dust, agricultural ground breaking etc., hangs out in the air a long time. It’s the smaller particles that are more hazardous, because they are easily absorbed into the lungs and into the blood stream where they can cause premature death.

In general, though, any form of toxic air pollution damages our natural environment and jeopardizes public health. Air toxins accumulate in the air we breathe and work their way up the food chain, eventually winding up in the food we eat. Eating contaminated food, like fish, and breathing contaminated air from wildfires, traffic, factories and construction, can cause cancer, birth defects and other serious health problems—or, so says The Sierra Club.

After struggling to find something hopeful about this gloomy information, I have arrived at an uplifting thought: At least we have free access to gloomy information. In China, for example, they don’t. And neither do foreign journalists covering the international Olympics. How can the Chinese government be so irreverent when it comes to promises!

Just like its promise to clean up the Olympic air in time for festivities, China had also promised the IOC (International Olympic Committee) to lift its censorship of the internet, or the Great Firewall. But guess what, Folks–they are going back on that promise, too. I know there are those who do not wish to follow links, so I have lifted information about China’s internet ban from the guardian.co.uk.

Journalists at the press centre for the Beijing Olympics. Photograph: Guang Niu/Getty Images

China has reneged on a pledge to provide journalists covering the Beijing Games with unrestricted internet access, Olympic officials have admitted.

Kevan Gosper, a senior member of the International Olympics Committee (IOC) who is overseeing the games, said yesterday that the only uncensored websites journalists at the event would have access to were those related to “Olympic competitions”.

The admission contradicts China’s promise to grant the international media “complete freedom to report” at the games, which it made seven years ago when bidding to host the Olympics.

The blocks on internet sites in the main press centre, which will house about 5,000 journalists, and other Olympic venues will make it difficult to retrieve information, particularly on political and human rights stories the government dislikes. Journalists at the main press centre yesterday found they were unable to access sites such as Amnesty International or any site with Tibet in the URL.

Speaking of Tibet, if you want to get the People’s Republic of China’s perspective, click on the banner across the top of the People’s Daily Online:

Appropriately enough, this link is provided at the top of an article touting their clean air.

And now we have come full circle— back to the subject of “air” and my delicious smelling gardenia! Here is a picture from Wikipedia, large on the page but brave and small against the pollution. I think it will make an inspiring sendoutgreetingcard.

Laura signing off.

p.s. Information about SendOutCards, along with all the opportunities therein, is one click away. It really is easy to design your own sendoutcard, complete with a personal message.