Also known as the pay wall.
"Dusty West raises air quality question; New, complicated chapter unfolding as problem grows" by Kirk Johnson New York Times / December 11, 2011
The question of how clean the air is in the American West has never been an easy one to answer. And now scientists say it is getting harder, with implications that ripple out in surprising ways, from the kitchen faucets of Los Angeles to public health clinics in canyon-land Utah to the economics of tourism.
It is at least partly about dust, something that has been entwined with Western life for a long time, and now appears to be getting worse.
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In the 1800s, the high deserts stretching west and south of the Rockies became a famed destination for respiratory sufferers like “Doc” Holliday, the gunfighter-dentist (and tuberculosis patient), who came to take what was called the desert cure.
But cattle and sheep by the tens of thousands were at the same time trampling across those fragile landscapes, loosening once stable soils to the four winds and creating a kind of parallel — but equally true — Western mythology around the tumbleweed and the dusty trail.
The region’s air quality, then as now, was partly pristine and partly poor depending on when and where you looked and which way the wind blew.
But now a new and even more complicated chapter appears to be unfolding, researchers in many different fields say. From off-road vehicle use, which has in some places replaced the clumping trod of the old cattle herds, to drought’s impact on plants with their soil-anchoring roots, more dust appears to be up and moving.
And scientists say they are also understanding for the first time the deep connections between the dust’s main source — a vast high-desert region called the Colorado Plateau, which stretches through four states and is home to national parks like the Grand Canyon and Arches — and the economic, environmental and demographic life in cities and suburbs far removed....
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