What Is True/Slant?
275+ knowledgeable contributors.
Reporting and insight on news of the moment.
Follow them and join the news conversation.
 

Apr. 29 2009 - 6:52 pm | 11 views | 0 recommendations | 4 comments

For clean air, there’s no place like Fargo

Smokestacks from a wartime production plant, W...

Image via Wikipedia

After chewing on numbers from the Environmental Protection Agency for months, the American Lung Association released its 2009 report on local air pollution today, and I don’t know about your home town, but things are looking hazy in Chicago, the City that Coughs.

Cook County got an F for ozone and an F for particle pollution, for an overall grade of F, making us feel like Barack Obama at a tea party. They figure 2.3 million of us are at risk from some terrible disease caused by air pollution, which is almost half of the Chicagoland population. The other half are superheroes.

So now we can either move to Fargo, America’s cleanest city, and become fans of the Redhawks baseball club, or we can stay true to the White Sox and look at the bright side: we’re not even in the top 25 most polluted cities. Sixty percent of Americans live in high pollution areas, according to this report. You can find out if your hometown is more or less fortunate from the Lung Association’s State of the Air report.


Comments

4 Total Comments
Post your comment »
 
  1. collapse expand

    For clean air, there’s no place like Fargo

    And with a population density like that, it boggles the mind.

  2. collapse expand
    Bob Moffitt

    Thanks for the post, Jeff. I work for the American Lung Association of the Upper Midwest (our main office is in Chicago) and wrote the news release about Fargo.

Log in for notification options
Comments RSS

Post Your Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment

Log in with your True/Slant account.

Previously logged in with Facebook?

Create an account to join True/Slant now.

Facebook users:
Create T/S account with Facebook
 

My T/S Activity Feed

 
     

    About Me

    Environmental reporting recruited me 25 years ago—on my first day as a reporter for my college newspaper, when I discovered my college was discarding radioactive waste in the regular city trash. Since then I've written hard news for dailies, including the Arizona Republic, and slanty news for alternative weeklies, including Newcity. I've written a column for New Times, stories on the Web for Forecast Earth, essays for PEN International and other magazines. I lived in an idyllic California village nestled among volcanoes and vineyards until my batteries were full of sunshine, and then I returned to my origins on the South Side of Chicago, where hope persists with no illusions about the struggle ahead. I cross the asphalt jungle by bicycle and el, mostly to get to the University of Chicago, where I teach journalism. But what matters more than any of this is a lifelong love for the natural world. We are all born with it, I believe, but some turn away.

    See my profile »
    Followers: 217
    Contributor Since: April 2009
    Location:Chicago, South Side

    What I'm Up To

    Posts from Copenhagen:

    COP-15