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It is the single greatest place I have ever been in my life. The air pollution in the cities I went to, which included Beijing, was no worse than it is in my Colorado city. They’ve done a lot to combat it, and though there’s still bad days, we also have bad days. Hell, we were known for the “brown cloud” for decades, and still regularly have inversions that cause the cloud these days, thankfully much less often though. There’s also a lot more electric vehicles there than there are here, so less ground level pollution from exhaust. I felt so sick my first couple days back in the states and everything smelled so bad. I didn’t even realize how bad it was until my nose wasn’t accustomed to it anymore.

We have to fight the armies of NIMBYs and developers to even get a suite of overpriced luxury condos or apartments built, and we’re still building gigantic McMansion suburbs like they’re going out of style, so I feel that in my bones. My nearest grocery store is more than 2 miles away, and there’s no way to get there without having to go down a 45mph road with no sidewalks. But we have pretty monoculture lawns! -_- thank god my family is willing to turn most of our lawn into pollinator gardens and food gardens… now if only we could convince our neighbors to do the same.