Imagine that you drive north from Montrose, Colorado to Grand Junction. Air quality starts out pretty good, gets worse. You take I-70 east to Glenwood Springs, then angle southeast, but higher, to Aspen. It looks like the smoke and ash of regional fires flow up both Colorado and Roaring Fork rivers. Upvalley. I felt it in my lungs which is what got me interested. Here's the key to my slapped together chart. 0 to 50 = Good 51 to 100 = Moderate 101 to 150 = Unhealthy for sensitive groups 151 to 200 = Unhealthy 201 to 300 = Very unhealthy 301+ = Hazardous I suspect this random bit of citizen science (data points from public resources) is no more than that. But wildfires move fast and fire isn't the only concern.
For over 25 years I was a weekly newspaper columnist. That doesn’t make me a journalist. Writing personal essays isn’t the same thing as reporting on the news. But I hung around with a lot of real newspaper professionals. I grew to respect them. I also saw what’s happened everywhere. Newspaper editions got thinner, not only in number of pages, but in the width and height, too. Mainly that’s because the business model for newspapers used to be based on advertising. Now most of that has shifted to the internet. Subscriptions don’t replace the lost revenue. Smaller papers are cheaper. Even big papers with international reputations were struggling. The Washington Post was one of them. In their case salvation came in the surprising form of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He bought the paper from the Graham family in 2013 for $250 million. At first, Bezos seemed content to mostly leave it alone. In 2017, the Washington Post adopted a new slogan: “democracy dies in darkness.” In February of this y...