Poo Air

When I crossed the Tehachapi Range and started the descent into Bakersfield and the Central Valley yesterday, the sky was brown. I've never seen it or smelled it that bad before. Bakersfield has the worst air in the country on many days throughout the year now, and is in hot pursuit of Los Angeles for the top spot on the majority of days, a dubious distinction indeed.

Smog in large parts of California has now gotten so bad I seriously don't know how people can stand it, and the current air inversion in the San Joaquin must be a record-setter for parts per million and all that. It's a bona fide ecological disaster, and undebatably and emphatically of human origin. Besides auto exhaust and (in Bakersfield) the effluvia of oil refining, the San Joanquin's smog also contains a lot of pesticides and, at certain times of the year, the herbicides farmers use to defoliate cotton.

It's a vicious, dangerous cocktail, and today it extended all the way from Bakersfield to Sacramento, nearly 300 miles of brown sky . In some places it was so bad that buildings appeared as hazy silhouettes, and it stank all the way to the point, a few miles beyond the Sacramento airport, where the sky once again began to appear more blue that gray or brown.

I look at the smog and wonder whether California will remain an anomaly, or whether it's the template for most of the world to come.