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LIVING DOWNSTREAM

"Score One for Smog," says the city paper headline, "to trees it brings an air of health"

Yet another sign of the increasing desperation to see something, anything, positive in polluted urban living, a sign of how asphyxiating our time has become. The fact that the trees studied grew three times larger in the city than in the suburbs is not seen as Frankensteinian; rather, the spin makes pollution sound nourishing, something to be perversely proud of. In fact, it's just that all those pollutants caused by heedlessly wasteful lifestyles are protecting the city trees from damage by the ozone resulting from sunlight action on polluting gases generated by those very same heedlessly wasteful lifestyles. The great cycle of toxicity wraps us in its dark embrace. The ozone then flows toward the 'burbs, where it adversely affects the poor trees, nakedly unprotected by the benificence of urban pollution. "City-grown pollution - and ozone in particular - is tougher on country trees that happen to be living in the pollution plume that flows from the city," says one of the ecologists. Pollution plume. I like that. Good thing the USA has a president who cares deeply about pollution and isn't richly funded by the pollution plumers. Something to consider in voting, and in selecting real estate near a city if you want bigger trees. One wonders about the difference in children, who are growing too. But like they say, we all live downstream now.