Carl Zimmer

And just to jump in for a second, just to circle back to William and Mildred Wells,

none of what I just said is new.

Richard and Mildred Wells were saying over and over again in speeches they gave, in letters they wrote to friends, they were like, we've had this incredible revolution in the early 1900s of getting clean water and clean food.

Why don't we have clean air yet?

We deserve clean air.

Everyone deserves clean air.

And so really all that people like Lindsay Marr and Joseph Allen and others are doing is trying to finally deliver on that call almost a century later.

Yeah.

So, you know, if you inhale smoke from a wildfire, you know, it's not going to start, you know, growing inside of you, but it, but those particles are going to cause a lot of,

damage.

They're going to cause a lot of inflammation.

They can cause not just lung damage, but they can potentially cause a bunch of other medical issues.

And unfortunately, climate change plus

the increasing urbanization of these kinds of environments, like in Southern California, where it's a fire ecology already, that is going to be a recipe for more smoke in the air.

We will be, unfortunately, seeing more fire.

You know, and, you know, we here in the Northeast, we were dealing with really awful smoke coming all the way from Canada.

So this is not a problem that respects borders.

And even if there were no wildfires, we still have a huge global terrible problem.

with particulate matter coming from cars and coal-fired power plants and so on.

Several million people, their lives are cut short every year, just day in, day out.