It's Getting Too Hot to Swim, and Too Hard to Breathe
Toxic water and toxic air. Quite the combo
There’s a toxic cloud spreading across multiple states down south in the U.S.
Arizona, California, Colorado, Indiana and Michigan are being swamped with a combination of ground-level ozone and wildfire smoke, and the fumes are spreading.
People impacted by this can expect serious respiratory issues; airway irritation and difficulty breathing. Particles in the smoke can wind their way into your bloodstream through your lungs, damaging multiple organs, including your heart and blood vessels.
If you have to be outside — please don’t, especially during the damned heat wave — then please wear a filtering mask or respirator and limit the time as much as humanly possible.
If you live elsewhere, keep an eye out for dangerous air alerts in your area. This stuff never stays contained, and the risk of spreading out on the wind is high.
Pets and kids need to be kept indoors, too.
Pollution is a real nasty bitch. Fumes make their way into the air, and chemicals leech into our soil and into our water sources. Either way, we’re being exposed to all kinds of poisons as a result of human construction and activities.
Just think of all the lead our parents and grandparents must have ingested over the years before we decided to fix that shit. Hell — Biden and Kamala made a concerted effort to strip lead just a few years ago.
That recent. Scary, right?
But lead isn’t the only toxin to fear. Asbestos. Carbon Monoxide. Arsenic. Bleach. All of the cleaning products in your home cabinets, and all of the chemicals used in constructing your house.
I can’t walk my dog without seeing signs on six or seven of my neighbour’s lawns, warning people not to let their pets roam nearby because they’ve been sprayed with pesticides.
The signs don’t work on wildlife, though. They don’t stop squirrels, birds, or mice.
They also don’t work on excited little kids running over the neighbour’s yard to get a ball that rolled away from their games.
We spew pollution carelessly, as a matter of convenience, and it’s so ubiquitous that we don’t even think about it. We don’t consider the harm we might be doing to anybody else.
Hell, our water sources is local underground springs. How much of that toxic shit melts down into my fucking drinking water because you wanted your lawn to be green?
Ocean temperatures are rising, pollution is rampant, and the air we breathe is getting dangerous, too.
It never ends. It just keeps getting worse.
Solidarity wins.
Since I live in Colorado, I get the smoky air and ozone up close and personal. Even if we did not have our own wildfires, we would be getting the smoke from Arizona and California. Even without any fires going out West, we would be having ozone warnings. Summer is ozone season for the Front Range of Colorado.
The Front Range is the land between the mountains and the plains that includes the foothills.
Speaking as a proud transplant Michigander and natural born Hoosier, the wildfire smoke has been crazy the last few years. I don’t think I ever had to worry about anything like this as a kid. It’s unfortunate that my kids don’t get the luxury of playing outside all the time because of it either.