"Air: The Search for One Clean Breath"
Produced by the district in 2008, this 40-minute film tells the story of air from its ancient beginnings to clean air technologies throughout the world. For lesson plans based on the film, see the Educator's Guide. If you would like a copy of the film on DVD or Blu-ray Disc, please contact Karin Grennan at karin@vcapcd.org or 805-303-4002.
Video Transcript
Intro
0:25 [Music]
0:40 [Music]
0:47 air so precious and mysterious that searching among the billions of stars
0:52 and planets in our galaxy we know of only one sure place to find it this
0:58 invisible layer wrapped around Earth is the delicate canopy surrounding our planet making life
1:05 possible in its pure form we can't smell taste or even see it and only as it
1:12 passes as an afternoon Breeze do we feel its presence but is air really
1:19 invisible is it possible that there might be a way to see it with something
1:24 other than our senses is it coming yes I think so it's 1:42 a.m. a deep breath
1:29 Maria Rodriguez takes her first breath but the air that fills her tiny
1:35 lungs had its own birth almost 5 billion years ago as the Earth was born so was the air
1:44 that surrounds her gases released from fiery Beginnings swirled around the new
1:51 planet over time volcanos and planetary eruptions spewed more gases trapped by
1:58 Earth's gravity microscopic bacteria began to grow on
2:03 the Earth's surface a balance was achieved between
2:09 the Earth the Sun and the air and so it was for billions of years until the rise
2:15 of man and in the blink of an eye the air changed
History of Air
2:23 forever early man put his own mark on the invisible world around him the
2:29 legacy of our ancestors includes not only prehistoric drawings on Cave walls
2:34 but soot covered ceilings left over from burning fires as poets and philosophers made
2:41 great strides interpreting the world around them air was left to the language of myth to explain its
2:49 Mysteries ancient Egyptians considered it a river between the heavens and
2:55 earth for the Greeks who believed the world consisted of four elements ments
3:00 fire earth water and air air was primary because it could transform into fire and
3:07 condense into water until the Advent of modern chemistry this view went largely
3:15 unchallenged in the 1500s a physician's son philippus theophrastus bombastus or
3:23 parsis as he called himself grew up watching his father treat sick Miners
3:29 and he deduced that their illness came from the dirty air they were breathing in the mindes a radical View at the time
3:38 his views weren't exactly popular it would be two more centuries before a
3:44 major breakthrough changed our understanding of
Joseph Priestley
3:49 [Music] [Applause] [Music] air on the outside Joseph Priestley was
3:57 an upstanding man of the cloth let us pray an English clergyman
4:03 dedicated to his religious Faith but inside Priestly also beat the
4:10 heart of a scientist he would perform countless experiments in his spare time even
4:16 though he had no formal training in science one of priest Le's experiments
4:21 involved heating mercuric oxide the result was the release of two different
4:27 gases which he called two two kinds of air he shared his experiments with a
4:34 French tax collector and scientist Antoine lavasier it was Lavoisier who quickly
4:41 realized that priest Le's two kinds of air were really two unique and distinct
4:48 gases Priestly and laier helped identify the principal components of air nitrogen
4:56 and oxygen but the the air also contained
Smog
5:01 smaller amounts of other chemicals and evolving recipe that would change
5:06 radically during the Industrial Revolution in the early 1900s in London
5:13 a new kind of air was described smog the word a combination of smoke and
5:21 fog was coined by Dr Herold devvo to describe the thick pungent air hovering
5:28 over the city on polluted days for the next several decades air
5:35 would continue to be a silent Force until smog screamed across the
5:40 [Music] headlines dinora is a One-Stop light
Donora
5:48 town in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania it's hard to imagine that this sleepy place was once a thriving
5:55 steel mill town and home to 14,000 resid residence during Halloween week in
6:03 1948 a blanket of air trapped the smoke and toxic fumes belching out from
6:09 dinora's steel and zinc factories it was just a pure yellow fog
6:16 that smelled like sulfur and you couldn't see the street lights you couldn't see any cars you
6:22 could see nothing just this yellow fog it was an unusual phenomenon that
6:29 persisted over several days killing 20 people and leaving hundreds evacuated or
6:36 hospitalized well one of my dear friends was a doctor and she had charge of it um
6:42 Jane said there wasn't anything to do they just brought them in I looked at them and said they're dead and that was
6:48 it they just kept them there till the funeral directors could take care of it
6:55 they had to just stay there poor souls
7:00 a decade later dinora's mortality rate remained higher than neighboring
7:06 areas its long-term effects are still
7:12 unknown what happened in dinora was rare but not unique in
7:18 1952 an air pollution disaster descended on London
London 1952
7:24 England Christmas comes but once a year but smog knows no calendar in fact like
7:30 the unwanted guest it always drops in when it's most inconvenient the smog went creeping across the country cutting
7:36 down visibility causing chaos in traffic holding up Christmas mail catching Everybody by the throat in its cold
7:43 clammy fingers when he visited the city at the end of the 19th century in the
7:48 middle of the Industrial Revolution the impressionist painter Claude Monae was
7:53 enchanted by the Myriad of colors he saw in the London sky but the Shimmer Marine
7:59 colors in Monae's masterpieces are in fact light reflecting off pollutants
8:05 suspended in the air and fog London's heavy Skies might have
8:11 stirred the creativity of a painter but it was the great fog of
8:16 1952 that made front page headlines a movon cameraman drove
8:22 through fog shrouded London to report on the traffic chaos the Great Smog Invasion affecting 30 counties has
8:28 caused a major dislocation of rail services with late arrivals and uncertain departures while the few
8:34 trains that are running serve to underline one of the causes of air [Music]
8:40 pollution it was dinora all over again this time on a massive
8:47 scale nearly 4,000 deaths were attributed to the killer fog it's a
8:53 menace this choking eye watering smog could what happened in London
Shanghai China
8:59 happen in today's world it's an easy question to answer because it's
9:04 happening right [Music] now Shanghai China is one of the world's
9:12 most polluted cities located near the geographic center of China a place where residents were
9:19 surgical masks and the sky turns yellow for days at a time the Industrial
9:25 Revolution came late to China but it arrived with a vengeance and it is clearly no coincidence that
9:32 respiratory illness is one of the leading causes of death but the problem is not limited to
9:40 one city in China satellite photos taken from space show us the Great Wall of China but they
9:47 also show us other things as well massive clouds of grayish matter smog
9:54 drifting across all our continents daily impacting the health of
10:01 millions while some of the smog is still created by the burning of coal for industrial purposes more and more of it
10:09 comes from our vehicles the cars and trucks that burn fossil
10:14 fuels ever since Professor Ari hoggin SMI discovered the photochemical link
10:19 between cars and air pollution the total amount of smog worldwide has increased
10:26 dramatically so even in the areas where smog may not be visible it is still
10:34 there a vanload of commuters hits the morning traffic in St Louis Missouri the
10:40 internal combustion engines emit smog forming pollutants into the
10:46 air 3 Days Later 700 M away hikers in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park
10:52 breathe in polluted air from the Vans fumes a snowboarder on the slopes of
10:58 Whistler mountain in Canada as he gasps for air he breathes in pollution from
11:04 one of China's industrial cities sound unbelievable maybe so but scientists are
Antarctica
11:12 only just beginning to discover how air currents are transporting pollutants from one corner of the globe to another
11:20 and this journey takes only a matter of days during this Voyage much of the
11:28 world's air eventually passes by right here at the South Pole a vast expanse of
11:35 ice no cars no industry no cities which makes it the ideal place to study air
11:42 pollution one of the things we can do in the in the Antarctic and in Greenland in fact is a drill deep into the ice
11:49 because as snow falls in through the atmosphere it collects some information about the climate State and how about
11:55 pollution in the atmosphere and it then laid down on the surface asnow snowfall and a snowfall builds up year after year
12:02 and it doesn't really melt in the polar regions so the ice just builds up year after year and just into a big thick
12:08 sequence up to 2 miles thick the ice in the Antarctic and we can drill from the surface down deep into it and as we
12:14 drill down into the ice we're effectively going further and further back in time here a team of atmospheric
12:20 scientists drill through the thick layers of hard-packed snow at the South Pole I'm digging for old Air in fact
12:27 there's no other source of old air on the planet except locked in the ice buried at Dome sea deep beneath the
12:34 surface are pockets of air Frozen in time for over a million
12:40 years the scientist's goal to retrieve and capture this trapped air in small
12:46 canisters and send them back to a lab for analysis it's just one way to get a
12:53 glimpse of how dramatically our air has changed since the last ice age what I'm
12:59 doing now is I'm taking a thin slice of the core in order to measure the the chemistry of the ice so what we're
13:04 looking for here is the pollution in the atmosphere the chemical pollution in the atmosphere rather than just the gases so
13:10 we can actually tell you the real atmosphere of 800,000 years ago if I were take a piece of ice and pop it into
13:16 some hot water for you you'll be able to see these little tiny bubbles bursting and coming to the surface and I'll be actually releasing air that was last
13:23 circulating around the atmosphere thousands of years ago
13:36 Dr Robert Mulaney and his team have chronicled a steady and disturbing rise
13:42 in global pollution of critical concern are the recorded levels of carbon dioxide
13:48 trapped in the ice core samples one of the things we can see is the levels of carbon dioxide and methane
13:54 in the atmosphere now these are what we call greenhouse gases these are the things that causing climate to change
14:00 today these are things that you worry about the carbon emissions from things like burning fossil fuels or using your
14:06 car to drive to work or to school or whatever they release these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like carbon
14:12 dioxide and we know this causes the temperature the atmosphere to start to warm we call this global warming or
14:18 climate change now if we look back over the past 800,000 years we know what the
14:23 natural levels of carbon dioxide and methane are the natural levels of the car of the greenhouse gases and today
14:29 we're very very much higher than we've ever been for the whole of that 800,000 years this phenomenon has many
Climate change
14:36 scientists worried already the effects of global climate change are evident once
14:43 prominent glaciers have receded dramatically in Montana's Glacier
14:48 National Park there are 26 glaciers left where only a century ago there were 150
14:55 glaciers nestled into the cliffs and Peaks in addition several Antarctic Ice
15:01 shelves have collapsed some disintegrating in the span of 5
15:07 days as ice melts sea levels will change scientists predict that over the next
15:14 Century sea levels will rise in the range of 4 in to 3
15:19 ft temperature variations will also cause increased damage from hurricanes
15:26 floods fires and infectious diseases and the data collected by M's
15:34 team shows a convincing link between pollution in the air and the unprecedented climate changes our world
15:41 is experiencing but measuring carbon
Monitoring stations
15:46 dioxide is only one of the indicators that show the air is changing air quality readings of other
15:53 hazardous pollutants like ozone sulfur dioxide and particle pollution are
15:59 taking worldwide a thousands of monitoring stations like this one in Ventura County
16:06 California the data in the United States is collected and forwarded to state and
16:11 federal agencies including the United States Environmental Protection
16:17 Agency this information enables them to determine which areas of the country do
16:23 not meet government Health standards for air quality today more than 100 million
16:30 Americans live in counties with unhealthful air so how did we get here
How did this happen
16:37 how did this happen to an ecological system billions of years in the
16:43 making it's us the way we live our choices our cars our factories our homes
16:52 the ships trucks planes and trains that
16:58 move us us and our Goods all over the
17:03 world 2 days after she took her first breath Maria Rodriguez is ready to go
17:09 home at the hospital every effort has been made to ensure the newborn's
17:14 perfect health but now that she's going home she faces the first major assault on her
17:21 body's ability to defend itself from outside attacks at home in her family's backyard
17:28 in East Los Angeles California she will not only breathe in the air which her body's cells need to function but she
17:36 will also begin breathing in an odd mixture of chemicals and
17:42 poisons 20,000 breaths a day just 200 yd from Maria's house is
17:50 the intersection of two major freeways thousands of cars and trucks
17:56 pass over these freeways each day day while trains pour into a nearby rail
18:02 yard all spewing diesel fumes only yards from her
18:08 crib today more people die every year
Air pollution and human health
18:13 from air pollution than die from automobile accidents in the United States and in
18:20 fact it's several times as many air pollution and its effects on human
18:25 health is a subject that Harvard Dr Joel Schwarz has made his life's
18:32 work we're trying to do studies that show how we get from the
18:39 particles in the air to the health effects so that we can see particles get in your lungs and there's more
18:46 inflammation more inflammation in your lungs and then we look at inflammation in the arteries so we see particles in
18:55 the air more heart attacks we're trying to get all the inter immediate steps filled in and we're trying to document
19:01 that every step of the process really is happening in people so there can't be any doubt in the Utah Valley where over
The Utah Valley
19:10 250,000 people live the effects of air pollution are crystal clear well there's
19:17 a steel mill in Utah that's in a valley in the middle of the mountains and the Rockies and and of course all those
19:24 mountains trap the air pollution in the valley but one year the Steelman went on strike and that winter the air pollution
19:31 concentrations were cut in half the next year the strike was settled they went back up again and when ardan Pope took a
19:39 look at Hospital admissions in the valley for pneumonia for Asma what he
19:45 saw was the Hospital admissions dropped dramatically the winter that the mill
19:51 was closed and went back up again when the steel mill started up again so it was as simple as could be
20:00 you turn off the pollution and fewer people get sick because of this shocking
A New Partnership
20:05 transformation of our air a new partnership is forming scientists
20:11 governments corporations and citizens themselves are taking action and creating innovative solutions to the
20:18 problem of air pollution this is one of our planet's youngest countries geologically speaking
20:27 Iceland this might seem an unlikely place for an air quality Revolution but that's the
20:34 best description for what's happening on this tiny island of 300,000 inhabitants
20:40 whose biggest industry is fishing Iceland aspires to become the
20:46 first nation on Earth to completely eliminate the burning of fossil
20:51 fuels but how does an entire country completely replace its dependence on oil
20:59 the answer lies in a gas that formed the basis for the creation of our galaxy 15
21:04 billion years ago hydrogen when exposed to oxygen hydrogen
21:11 creates a combination of electricity and water providing ample energy to run a
21:16 car truck or even a space shuttle without creating any harmful
Blazing Hydrocarbon
21:22 emissions this adventure in Iceland is about displacing hydrocarbon out of our energy economy totally
21:28 we now have about 30% 31% of our energy is imported hydrocarbons in in the post World War II
21:36 period we displaced coal from heating ravic by using geothermal and in this in
21:41 this new millennium we're now now we want to displace hydrocarbon from our economy by making our own domestically
21:49 made hydrogen in Iceland the hydrogen will be generated using geothermal
21:54 energy that naturally exists there the the Earth is cooling off she she has to
Sweating Mechanism
22:01 get or it has to get rid of the energy some way and the the heat energy is
22:06 dissipated through the plate boundaries and through volcanoes those are the sweating mechanism of Mother Earth and
22:14 actually what we are doing here we are sitting at the plate boundaries so we are sitting in the the sweating organ
22:21 one of the sweating organs and topping off the energy which means that the production of hydrogen will not release
22:28 any other harmful pollutants into the air while fuel cell technology was
22:34 originally developed for the US Space Program in the 1960s it has not become commonplace
22:41 because hydrogen is difficult to produce and store in mass quantities in a safe clean and cost effective
22:48 manner we have been offering Iceland as a platform for testing the hydrogen
22:53 economy so Iceland is seen and we have our government with us in this is seen as an international platform for testing
23:00 this technology Iceland is not alone in its pioneering Spirit here at the EVS 23
Alternative Fuels
23:08 show there are nearly 100 different alternative fuel cars on display from
23:14 solar powered to hydrogen fuel cell to natural gas and everything in
23:20 between they all share one thing in common fewer harmful
23:25 emissions even the hybrid vehicle which uses a combination of gasoline power and electricity Cuts emissions
23:33 dramatically you know we have to find creative ways of tapping in a useful energy I mean energy is everywhere but
23:39 in terms of useful energy there's only a certain finite amount of it but we could use renewable technology and using them
23:44 in Creative infrastructure ways that we could create fuel for our use and be able to sustain ourselves the important
23:50 thing here is being able to sustain develop and be able to meet that level of energy Demand with the growing
23:56 population that's going to be the greatest challenge as we get to the Future here is that population growth it's you know year after year it's
24:02 growing and growing then that Demand on energy is growing and growing as well so we need to find a way that we could be
24:07 able to provide that level of energy demand in a sustainable way which has no harmful effect on the environment in
Energy Efficiency
24:14 fact if every vehicle on us roads today were a hybrid we would reduce air
24:20 pollution by more than half but Motor Vehicles are only part of
24:26 the challenge in Europe and America the energy used to light heat and power our
24:32 buildings and homes uses about 40% of all energy consumed adding even more
24:39 pollution to our air from power plants here in South London an 84 unit
24:45 development is proving that clean air starts at home it's called bedzed The
24:52 Zed standing for zero emissions energy this is one of the most most
24:58 energy efficient places to live in the industrialized World walls 19 in thick keep
25:05 temperatures comfortable year round windows are triple glazed a wind-driven
25:11 ventilation system feeds outside air into each house all the time these
Energy Recovery
25:16 buildings are breathing they're sucking in fresh air from the roof and they're extra extracting stale air but what's
25:22 clever is the outgoing stale air preheats the incoming fresh air without
25:27 cross contamination so these are healthy buildings but they're also very firmly efficient buildings that's recovers 70%
25:34 of the heat in the winter and gives you nice clean air inside the rooms and whatever energy these homes
25:41 still need after taking advantage of all these Energy Savers comes from a state-of-the-art onsite power
25:49 plant these simple Innovations help shrink the amount of energy needed for
25:54 daily living virtually every part of said has been designed to make it very
26:00 easy to lead a low carbon lifestyle or that's the idea so people haven't had to make a great um effort it's all just
26:07 inherent in every single design decision so for starters you don't have to if you
26:13 don't want to travel to work you don't have to spend an hour and a half commuting to work the the workspace is integrated there's enough desk space
26:19 here for everybody who lives here to work here if they want to at some point in the
26:25 future the residents of bedzed aren't Echo zealots they are simply people who
26:30 are at the Forefront of a global Trend toward reducing energy consumption in the
26:36 home we're consuming too many resources in the world uh and at the moment we're consuming more resources than the earth
Resource Use
26:43 can sustain about 25% more and if you look at that you can actually divide that up into a fair share if you divide
26:49 the the world population into this amount of land and leave a little bit for wildlife and Wilderness and that
26:55 means that um in the Europe we're using three times as much as we ought to be
27:01 using which means that if everyone in the world lived like a European we'd need three planets to support us whereas
27:07 in the United States um even more resources are being consumed unfortunately I think because you have
27:13 such a great lifestyle with the Wide Open Spaces um and if everyone in the world
27:19 lived like the average American then we'd need five planets to support us so we need to look at reducing our resource
27:25 use and I think what we've shown here bed said is that you can actually reduce your uh resource use down to a One
27:33 Planet level without compromising on your quality of life in the United States new green
27:40 communities are being constructed and individual homes are also being retrofitted so that energyefficient
27:47 Technologies become standard practice throughout the Housing Industry but what
27:53 if you don't live in an energy efficient Community like bedzed and you don't drve drive an alternative fuel vehicle are
28:00 the rest of us powerless and helping to transform the air around us Angelo Logan doesn't think so Angelo
28:10 is a mechanic by trade he has lived in Maria's neighborhood all his life a
28:16 neighborhood that is home not only to 13,000 residents but also home to the
28:21 710 freeway considered the busiest freeway in the United States it's become
Goods Movement
28:28 a a cross uh uh intersection of goods movement uh with diesel trucks and
28:34 diesel trains intersecting the community and uh SP out black s throughout the
28:40 neighborhood every day over 47,000 trucks pour into this community bringing
28:46 cargo from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to a Transportation Hub where they will be shipped out to the rest of
28:53 the country in fact over 50% of of all the products imported from Asia come
29:00 through Commerce California so wherever you live in the United States you are
29:05 likely to buy an item that has traveled on the 710 freeway I moved here in
Air Pollution
29:12 1945 uh behind my home were Japanese Farms since then trucks are within 10 ft
29:18 of our home uh noise lights and total
29:23 pollution because of the trains idling some night they idle from night to
29:29 morning but the railroad's not going any place and the homes are still there and
29:35 we' got sickness I just feel like I'm contaminated by a bunch of stuff cuz
29:42 that's just scary having 47,000 trucks coming and just driving right past your
29:49 house and by everyone else's house Physicians and scientists at the nearby
29:55 kek school for medicine at at the University of Southern California have been charting the health of all the
30:01 communities that border the 710 freeway for over 20 years over the last several
30:08 years there been an increase of respiratory illnesses in children and elderly um asthma bronchitis and uh
30:17 elevated level of cancers a lot of my um close friends fathers and parents have been diagnosed with terminal
30:24 cancer but long before Angelo had this concrete evidence he became an
30:29 environmental Advocate his title Project Director for the East yard communities
30:36 for environmental justice obscures Angelo's straightforward Mission cleaner
30:42 air for healthier lives for everyone no matter where you live my feeling is we
30:50 need children young adults to know about the
30:56 green and to get out in their community and fight for this pollution that's
31:02 happening yeah I just like the pollution to stop instead of moving cuz you know
31:09 this is a great place the East yard community group has definitely had their
31:14 voice heard throughout the region not only have they mobilized their own
31:19 neighborhood but have also joined forces with other organizations to make their concerns known throughout Southern
31:26 California californ today the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles that once were
31:32 considered to be major polluters in the area are making international news as
31:37 they bring new Innovative clean Technologies and green initiatives to their daily business practices it's our
Port of Long Beach
31:45 air we all breathe the same air the port belongs to the people the people are engaged and belong to the port and so
31:54 since it's our air and we all have to breathe it it's important that we help clean it up I think it's a good example
32:00 of when a community comes together we can make a difference we can uh improve the quality of life for the local
32:06 community and improve the air quality for the whole region in general and so it's it's only unique that we took
32:12 action you know several years ago but um I think that you know other communities are very similar to this and can also
32:18 take action as well as his awareness has grown he's become even more committed to
32:24 making sure the health of every person in his immunity is being taken into
32:29 account you don't need a degree to know that the pollution kills and that pollution is dangerous for children to
32:35 breath the more we learn about air the more we
32:40 discover and as it turns out air really isn't
32:45 invisible it shows up in the visions of our great artists it shows up in global
32:50 health statistics it shows up in new and cleaner
32:56 Technologies and it shows up in the efforts of air quality Visionaries the residents of bedzed in England the
33:03 island nation of Iceland and countless others who continue to heal the
33:09 air but there are still profound questions for the future what will our air be like 10
33:16 years from now or 100 breathe [Music]
33:25 in the search begins with you
33:44 [Music]
34:24 [Music]