Air Quality: Past, Present and Future
Ashley Richardson
POL 310
Paul Edleman
Ashford University
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The topic of air quality can be a hot button issue in our nation today in personal, corporate and political situations. These three facets of society cannot seem to agree on the need and measures that need to be taken to improve air quality or the timeline in which any actions need to be taken. This is not a new predicament that society finds itself in though, since the dawn of the industrial age mankind has wrestled with the balance needed between the health and welfare of the people and their environment and the need for production and commerce. Even in the digital age that we live in, mankind still wrestles with the balance that is needed to produce enough to support our population, how these produced goods affect the quality of our atmosphere and how we can reach a sustainable symbiosis with our planet to finally relieve the stresses we put on our only ecosystem. As times march forward and third world nations develop and become industrialized it puts more pressure on our nation, along with the other world leaders, to make the critical changes to our lifestyle and industries that can give a shining example to these up and coming nations for what they can be and how sustainable industry can help an economy grow.
When air quality began to become an issue or a recognized issue at least, it was the dawn of the Industrial age, an age that would bring much change to our way of life in terms of quality, social structure and what we would come to accept in the name of progress. The invention that spurred this age on was the steam engine, invented by James Watt in 1775; it was a device that burned fuel such as wood and coal to produce usable power to run mechanical devices. While the issue of air quality can easily be blamed on the burning of fossil fuels that this invention spurred, we can also see the impact that humans of this time had on their own and the...