Blades of Glory, fumes of cars

My daughter and I went to see the new Will Ferrell movie, Blades of Glory today. Very enjoyable – funny, interesting twists but no great need to think very much, happy ending. My kind of movie. And the previews of Shrek III were hilarious.

We walked to the movie, for exercise and something to do together. Walking along Barbur Boulevard is fun with an amiable companion, but not in itself. Sidewalks are few and far between, crosswalks inconsistent. The ditches at the side of the road are disgusting, filled with trash, weeds, and at least one large dead (long dead) animal. I say, “at least one”, because after seeing the first, we tried not to look down. The roar of the traffic and whooshing of nearby vehicles made conversation difficult. The experience made me wonder whether the benefit in the exercise of walking was countered or outweighed by the health impacts of breathing exhaust. Yesterday, we walked to Multnomah Village, along Capitol Highway, stopping at McDonald’s for an ice cream cone on the way home. I Googled on return, and learned I burned 320 calories in the walk, consumed only 150 in the cone. Boo-yah!

A BBC report in 2000 claimed it’s more dangerous to walk down the street in London than to cross it, because of pollution. Wouldn’t it be cool (and helpful) to be able to look up air quality data for a particular location on a particular day, to aid in deciding whether to go outside for a walk, or run up and down the stairs inside at home instead? The Northwest District Association paid for a study of air quality in NW Portland as part of their advocacy on their Neighborhood Plan, and found high levels of many toxins. Perhaps the reason we don’t know more about local air pollutants is because we seldom check to see what they are, and we seldom check the levels because then we’d have to do something about them.

Or maybe not, as NWDA and the Environmental Justice Action Group (EJAG) working on air pollution near I-5 in North Portland have discovered.