Word: smog
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Today Ota Dōkan's poem is remembered more in sorrow than anything else. His beloved town has mushroomed into the world's most populous-and most polluted-capital, home to 11.4 million gasping people. The fabled pines are suffocating from smog. The blue sea is washed by tons of noxious industrial wastes. Tokyoites lament that soaring Fuji-san, obscured by deadly clouds of sulfur dioxide, shows its face only one day out of every...
Complicating the matter further, much of the city's lethal, eye-smarting smog, which sent 8,000 persons to the hospital last July, sweeps into Tokyo from factories outside the prefecture in the bustling Yokohama-Kawasaki region. Though the Diet passed 14 anti-pollution measures last winter, including the power to arrest offenders as criminals, Premier Sato has yet to demonstrate any enthusiasm for enforcement, presumably for fear of alienating big business contributors to his party...
...million times the light-gathering power of the unaided eye, the giant telescopes are extremely sensitive to the slightest glare in the sky. Even the light from a city 50 miles away can blot out the dim specks produced on a photographic plate by a distant galaxy or quasar. Smog adds to the astronomer's headache; by scattering ground light in all directions, tiny smog particles can greatly increase the glare over an observatory. Not only the amount, but also the character of the light can affect a telescope's usefulness. Increasingly, mercury-vapor street lamps...
...Angeles came in fourth; Doublet said that he had found less smog there than he had expected. In last place, the Paris administrator listed New York. Central Park was joli, he agreed, but "if they brought New York's subway to Paris, I assure you there would be a revolution." Later Doublet's office issued a statement denying that he had cast aspersions on New York...
...Smog," the second story, spreads another sort of gray symbolically over all Italian life. The narrator is the editor of an antismog magazine called Purification, financed by an industrialist who is one of the guiltiest smog makers. Nothing might appear more hopeless than the quandary of an Italian couple in "The Argentine Ant," whose baby is overrun by marching ants, against whom all antidotes fail. But the minor characters of this crawly little fable -like Captain Brauni with his Rube Goldberg ant traps-have a jaunty energy that enables them to survive not only their plague but the plague...