Red Days and the Air We Share

Rachel Bublitz

I moved to Salt Lake City ten years ago, and was surprised by the terrible air quality, and then, on top of that, to learn that it’s the norm here.

Please excuse me while I get a little technical… The bad air partly because of geography; Salt Lake City is in a valley with mountains to the east and west. This creates a bowl, which, under the right circumstances, makes it hard for particulate matter to disperse. The circumstances that create the bowl effect are temperature extremes, either very hot or very cold, and a lack of precipitation. Salt Lake is a high desert, so right off the bat we often have long stints without rain or snow, and with climate change making all weather more extreme, we get those high heats and low colds more often. The particulates getting trapped are everything from car exhaust to industry by products. Humans are excellent at making messes, it turns out.

I wanted to write a play set in this bad air quality, but dialed up all the way up to ten. These red days aren’t new to Salt Lake, though we are getting more of them, but now places around the country, and the world, who don’t typically deal with bad air are having to suffer through them. Just a few years ago San Francisco experienced multiple purple days, which is one worse than red, after winds and a wildfire created a “perfect” bad air storm. And the summer before Red Days premiered in New York City, they experienced a similar cloud of immoveable dust blown in from another set of wildfires.

So, here we are. Hot days are getting hotter, cold days colder, rain is less often, and more extreme when it comes, and wildfires are so regular that parts of the country even have a wildfire season.

When are we going to do something about this? What is there to do? And how can we continue in our lives while dealing with red days? Or even the dreaded purple or black days?

I’m no scientist. I don’t know the answers. But I do think that as citizens of the world, we need to ask these questions. Dianna, the protagonist from Red Days asks these questions and more.

While Red Days is an environmental play, it’s also a coming-of-age story as we watch Dianna find herself and what she stands for.

My hope is that Red Days starts conversations. And inspires folks to come up with questions of their own.