Why are we living in haze in Utah Valley?

At Saturday's second annual Living Green in Utah Valley Expo, held in Provo's Pioneer Park, two heroes of the Utah green movement gave an answer: haze, and it's health hazards, will remain until residents demand otherwise.

Dr. Brian Moench, founder of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, and C. Arden Pope, a BYU professor who pioneered research linking air pollution and human health, were both given the first-ever Earth Stewardship awards by the Utah Valley Sierra Forum at Saturday's expo.

While accepting his award, Moench told those gathered that Utah and Utah Valley are simply not demanding safe, clean air.

Utah Valley -- not the state but just our valley -- is ranked among the worse areas in the U.S. for air pollution, according to festival speakers.

Moench equated local attention to public health to the time and money being spent to rebuild aging bridges on Interstate 15, or building earthquake-safe schools, both of which the state is now doing. Utah's public health policy toward clean air is akin to waiting until a couple of bridges collapse, killing people, or a couple of schools crumble in earthquakes to decide there is a problem, he said.

The approach is backward and oddly tolerated, though the same philosophy would never fly if it were applied to roads or schools.

"If we can afford new bridges, we can afford clean air," Moench said.

Moench says he takes all this personally because he now has five immediate family members, including a daughter and a son, who have cancer, and 80 percent of all cancer is caused by environmental factors.

It is time for Utah Valley to care about the air we breath, he said.

Pope, too, was called a hero on Saturday, a monicker he denied. But when Moench took the stand, he said Pope was being too modest.

"Pope's career was put at risk on several occasions" by local government and business officials who strenuously disagreed with his research, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, Moench said.

"He is a hero, and his is one of my heroes," Moench said of Pope.

"There is nothing heroic about what I have done," said Pope as he accepted his award.

When Geneva Steel shut down for 13 months in the 1980s, a student came to him asking for a suggestion on a research topic. Local mothers had claimed in the media that their sick children got well when Geneva was shut down, and got ill again when it went back into production.

Pope told his student to gather information about whether claims from local mothers were supported by hospitalization data. The student then dropped out of his class, but arrangements for the data had already been made.

Pope was stunned to find the data supported the parents, a claim he had assumed was false. His interest piqued and "answering one question led to several more questions," he said.

Now, two decades later, his work has led to a change in federal law regulating air pollution, and that change led the Environmental Protection Agency to recently tell Utah and other states that our air is too dirty and federal funding for transportation could be frozen if state government does not act to fix the problem.

"Twenty years ago I assure you no one was giving out plaques" for the then-controversial work he was doing, Pope said.

"I love the name of this award: Earth Stewardship," he said. "I don't think I deserve this award, but I am really proud to have it. Let's all try to be better stewards of the earth, even though I don't think we'll all get plaques for it."

BYU professor George Handley also spoke at the festival on Saturday. He asked those gathered to consider the environment from a religious perspective.

"Working to decrease our carbon footprint is learning to live more modestly," he said.

"I'm very eager for this community to act on its formidable principles to get going in a much more sustainable way."

Environmental degradation is on some level the result of indifference to life, he said. Nature has inherent spiritual value.

"Taking principled action is what this expo is about and I hope that is what we will commit to do," he said.