Word: smog
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South Central Los Angeles looks a lot like the rest of the city -- smog- filtered sunlight, palm trees, pastel-colored stucco apartments. It doesn't look like a ghetto. The gang writing on cement walls, criminal samizdat that cops read for news of a planned attack with the expert alacrity of CIA cryptologists, is fastidiously printed; it bears little resemblance to the loopy graffiti of New York City...
Aesthetes may complain that Barcelona lacks the glittering royal art galleries and grandiose vistas of London, Madrid or Paris and that its geography, a natural amphitheater framed by mountains and sea, produces a smog worthy of Los Angeles. Some may even view as excessive chauvinism the natives' insistence on speaking Catalan rather than Spanish. But those who take the time will discover in this most Mediterranean of cities a rare personality, fanatically avant-garde yet obsessively preservationist. First century Roman baths are being excavated amid the twisting streets of its dense Gothic quarter. The famous Picasso Museum is housed...
...major source of the pollution is the relentless burning of soft, brown high-sulfur coal, called lignite, which is the basic fuel of the East bloc. On cold winter days in Leipzig, the yellow-brown smog emitted by coal-fired power plants is so thick that drivers are forced to turn on their headlights during the day. In the triangle comprising southern Poland and northern Czechoslovakia, which is covered by a permanent cloud of emissions from factories and power plants, residents complain that the air is so bad that washed clothes turn dirty before they can dry on the line...
This is not to deride clean air. Clean air is important, and the clean air bill now working its way through Congress is a quite satisfying triumph of democratic compromise, smog-producing Detroit working out with smog-ingesting Los Angeles a political arrangement that the whole country can live with. But the great dichotomies of war and peace, left and right, good and evil are gone. Politicians still try to use these categories to carry the fight, but no one believes them...
...people and pollution, and it no longer takes a hydrologist or climatologist to detect it. Every American can see it in the air. You can stand with Nancy Reagan on the lawn of her sun-drenched Bel Air home above Beverly Hills and see a sinister tongue of smog lick out and engulf the office where her husband works just three miles below. Or you can walk along the low hills of North Dakota and scuff through the shifting soil that still blows against the stubble in the dry fields. Same message...