POLLUTION SOLUTION = DILUTION? OR DISTRIBUTION

Who needs a pollution solution?

We need a solution.

How do we find a solution to pollution?

Ask a guy in a bar after spending a week in the Arizona oven.

He said, “The solution to pollution is dilution.”

It sounded like advice from the Wizard of Oz scarecrow.

Then he ordered another beer while I stood there wondering what other gems of wisdom I’d been missing.

How often do you feel in sync with a know-it-all? What if you’re the know-it-all?

Everyone knows what dilution means:

The top picture is the land surrounding Phoenix Sky Harbor airport.

I sat sweating in a hot plane lifting off over acres of white flat topped warehouses.

My disorganized brain got organized thinking about those buildings and what was in them.

What was in them? All the stuff that makes a city run.

It’s flown in, moved to separate warehouses, broken down for its next destination and trucked out.

Is it fair to say the goods move from one super-big box to the regular big box stores?

At the top of the picture are houses of big box shoppers.

Big Box Pollution Or Solution?

Phoenix is big, real big.

And getting bigger in spite of the heat wave.

The people in and around Phoenix want the same things you want, I want.

Maybe more sun screen, fans, and air conditioners, but other than that the same.

The further from the airport, the big warehouses dilute out, giving way to residential neighborhoods, blocks and blocks of residential neighborhoods.

Followed by more and more blocks of residential neighborhoods that seem to go on forever.

Everyone has a leaky pipe, needs a new hose, a new rug.

Call it infrastructure, distribution infrastructure, where the goods flown into Sky Harbor get sorted and loaded and trucked out to the stores surrounding the residential blocks.

Then home.

The goal of the distribution network is getting home with the goods.

The Edge Of Civilization?

Eventually the road ends.

The next street over isn’t a street but a barren patch of desert.

So is the backyard.

Is it the end of civilization, or the beginning of natural life?

Either choice, it looks like a walk on the wild side.

A hot walk.

Let’s review the pollution solution in regular life.

Shop locally, except you can buy the same thing for less at a big box store.

Farm to table food?

I don’t see a lot of farms across the expanse that is Phoenix, but I saw salads on tables.

Unless you have a a convenient sea port where you live, population centers in every state fly in supplies, trucking companies move it around and deliver it, we drive to the store.

Every stage needs a pollution solution; every stage is a challenge.

From the pavement that airplane wheels, truck wheels, and your wheels roll on, to the manufacturing process for the planes, trucks, and cars, there’s a pollution solution.

Add in the new fence, a cook top, or shade pop-up you buy from Home Depot, or Lowe’s, or WalMart, to a pollution solution.

Once you’ve got your mind around the bigger picture, how can any of it be diluted and still work?

If you can think of one, leave your pollution solution in comments.