Well....Perhaps....I Don't Know

The question of pollution in Ankang comes up now and again from foreigners here and at home. We have all heard of the horrible air pollution in China. What is it? Thirty-five of the top twenty smog polluted cities in the world are in China?

The Ankang locals will tell you the air and the water in Ankang are clean. I tend to agree. Doesn't mean I drink the tap water unboiled or swim in the river, and, yes, I wonder about seldom seeing a deep blue sky. Our blue skies here, until this week, are generally quite pale. Many days the skies are like the one in the picture. (You are right. That is a church steeple. It is the steeple of the Catholic church in Ankang.)

There are those who think the cloudy skies are smog. Those foreigners come from hometowns where they see deep blue sky everyday all day. I come from a hometown that is often cloudy and foggy. So I point out that Ankang is in the mountains and it is on a river. The weather prediction is often for fog. Doesn't that mean fog, not smog? I look at the evaporation off the river, as in this picture, and think fog not smog.



On the other hand, I have seen and smelled some terrible exhaust fumes in city traffic. Once I rode my bike behind several big trucks and I wondered if I might pass out. The exhaust was ghastly black stuff. But, for a city of this size, we have little traffic. And, as you see in this photo, not all of the vehicles are spouting fumes. So how could the traffic possibly be making all those gray skies?


The Internet tells me that the charcoal used here for heating and cooking emits poisonous gases. You only have to be in a small enclosed area with one of these burners to smell the toxins and feel the poisons in your lungs. But are there enough of them being used to create the clouds we have? We have some manufacturing outside of town that puts out some fumes. Again I wonder if it is enough to make the type of smog you can see in Beijing or Xi'an which truly are industial areas. In Ankang I don't smell or feel poisons and toxins out in the open, on cloudy or noncloudy days.

We do have dust. Everything is covered with it. We don't get enough heavy rains to wash it away. I tend to think the dust is from the large amount of construction going on. Whole blocks are being torn down and large complexes rising. Everywhere. So is that dust graying our skies?








I am puzzled by the amount of phlegm people hawk here. The sidewalks, stairwells, streets, and sometimes floors are littered with it. What makes that necessary? Other than a belief that one must rid their body of an evil spirit. Why do they have that phlegm to begin with? I don't think I could find that much mucus in my lungs if I tried. However I do sometimes think the circles around my eyes are darker and the bags under them greater since coming here. Can I blame this worsening condition on bad air? It's not what I blame it on at home. One of the foreigners here says when she rides her bike the air stings here eyes. I've heard people talk of that in my hometown and there we know the air is clean. I also know that my eyes have never been red or stingy here as they were years ago when I lived in LA for a short time.

On an afternoon like yesterday, yesterday when I took the picture of the evaporation off the river in the morning, when the sun came out in the afternoon I took this picture of Ankang with probably the bluest sky I've seen. No, the blue is nothing like in Tibet. But on this day it looked pretty good to me. Yes, I see the haze....in the distance.