Summer has arrived and in southern Ontario, bad air has arrived with it. In one city &#0151 London, Ontario &#0151 the response to the anticipation of air pollution was simple: force out oneof the country&#0146s best air quality managers and tell everyone his salarywould be better spent &#0147planting trees.&#0148

James Moore was behind a bold and ultimately rejected planto help clean the city&#0146s air before he lost his job at the Middlesex-London Health Unit. Hisstory reveals some of the biggestproblems facing any effort to clean up the environment: denial and fearof the unknown. It also illustrates the importance of fixing what isshaping up to be the next big health crisis in Canada &#0151 deaths linkeddirectly to environmental pollution.

Moore&#0146s work in London earned him recognition across Canada. TheFederation of Canadian Municipalities called his November, 2001, The AQPlan &#0147among the best such plans completed in Canada.&#0148 The David SuzukiFoundation wrote a letter to London&#0146s mayor asking her to reconsider thedecision to remove funding for Moore&#0146s position.

The job at the health unit was originally created as part of a packageof recommendations coming out of a 2000 report commissioned by the cityand completed by a task force made up of representatives from academiaand business.

Moore first became interested in the environment while working in Kitchener aspart of that city&#0146s longstanding efforts to reduce energy use. He heardabout a report just completed in London so he called and asked for acopy. Soon he had written his own ideas into a report he sent back tothe health unit. By July, 2001, he was hired and in London.

According to Moore, 20 per cent of hospital admissions for acute bronchitis andpneumonia in infants under the age of one in Ontario are linked to ozone. The Ontario Medical Association estimates that 1,900 people died prematurely because of air pollution in 2000.

The numbers bring to light a growing problem in Canadian municipalpolitics. Although there has been lots of publicity surrounding thefederal government and the Kyoto Protocols, few cities have anyoneworking on air quality issues.

The city of London decided in its 2003 budget to cutthe $120,000 needed to keep Moore at the health unit and offered to movehis position to city hall. The idea was to have Moore work on the mayor&#0146s own quickly throwntogether air quality plan. Moore looked at the plan and began writing areport of his own detailing why the mayor&#0146s plan would not work. This action cost him the job at city hall.

But he intends to stay on in London.

&#0147I&#0146ve had hundreds and hundreds of people come forward, people I didnt evenknow, supporting me and the desire for the work and the appreciationhave been really heartwarming and it&#0146s really hard to leave a place likethat& So Im going to do my best, if I can, to serve this community andkeep going,&#0148 says Moore. For legal reasons, he cannot say howhell stay or who he might eventually work for if he does.

All the political maneuvering surrounding his job have taken timeaway from Moore&#0146s true passion, air quality. It was even on his mindlast summer when he tried skydiving for the first time.

&#0147The Cessna was climbing up and I was talking to the guy and there wasthis big grey haze right across Ontario, and I said, &#0145You see that?That&#0146s what I do for a living,&#0146 &#0148 he says.

Moore, 37, graduated from theUniversity of Waterloo with a degree in systems engineering in 1998. His work involves a confusing mix of physics,chemistry and engineering. But he tries to look at the large picture around air pollution. For example, he says, ten people can build wind turbines over two years at a costof $3 million. All the hard work results in a certain reduction inemissions. But there are more factors at work. Duringthose same two years any number of new office buildings could have beenbuilt as part of the normal development of a city. The emissions fromthe new buildings erase any gains made from the turbines.

So both time and money have been wasted, he says.

Not everyone agreed with Moore&#0146s idea of how to fix the air in London,which included using lake water temperature differences to run airconditioners.

The idea is easier to do than it sounds, says Moore. At certain timesduring the year, water coming into the municipal supply is at the sametemperature as water used in air conditioners. If the city installedheat exchanges in the water lines, large buildings could take advantageof the naturally cooled supply, he says.

The AQ Plan also suggests switching to fuel cells and convertingexisting gasoline infrastructure to carry liquid hydrogen.&#0147I think his plan was impractical to say the least,&#0148 said deputy mayor, Russ Monteith, quoted in the London Free Press.&#0147We could take that$120,000 and plant trees or get more people riding the bus. Those arepractical things I think we can do.&#0148

Moore defends his plan as being both London-focused andpractical. In response to the idea of planting more trees, Moore saysthat his plan called for countywide tree planting projects.

Engineers can only work from facts and numbers. They are not evenallowed to have opinions, says Moore.

&#0147It seems that my plan talks about a number of &#0145weird&#0146 technologies or&#0145odd&#0146 technologies or &#0145esoteric&#0146 technologies &#0151 these are all words Ive hadpeople tell me &#0151 but it&#0146s all based on things that are already beingdone,&#0148 saysMoore.

It&#0146s just a question of time and people becoming comfortable with newtechnology. Both the automobile and the telephone had to be introducedand then adopted by the public, he says.

Moore talks about discussion from the 1960s on air pollution. The problem hasbeen around for a long time, he says. He wonders if his work will helpfinally solve the problem or fade into history like much of the workdone before him.

Moore remembers sitting in his car at a stoplight watching a tree fullof starlings. One of them would take flight and soon enough all of themwere in the air circling the tree. But they had nowhere to go so oneand then eventually all of them landed back on the tree, Moore says.

It&#0146s the same with some environmentalists, he says.&#0147They come, they get all energized, they get the support, and then theygo and try all the same solutions they&#0146ve tried before. Then they realizethat it doesn&#0146t work, they get exhausted and they land back in thetree. Whether or not Im just one of the starlings and everyone willjust land again, that remains to be seen.&#0148