atmospheric instability?

So I just got out of my PAS 340 final: Air Quality and Air Pollution. I feel pretty good about it. My flashcards worked! Huzzah huzzah!

Anyway, as I was walking up to the test, I was looking at those infamous flashcards of doom and imminent destruction, and one card in particular stood out.

What is the major cause of health-affecting inversions?

Atmospheric stability.

And it was so weird to read that, even though it had never been weird before. It just hit me--

I did a lot of research on the Bujagali Falls hydropower dam just a few months ago, and in my research I found that hydropower dams cause a lot of problems in the surrounding environments. Why? Because they cut off the flow of the water. Stagnant water eutrophicates, which basically means that while it's stagnating, algae and other small organisms thrive, and eventually use up all the oxygen and suffocate everything in the lake. You know a lake has experienced eutrophication if the whole thing is basically stinky and dead.

Anyway. It never occurred to me before that stability, in that sense, could be so.... you know, not good. I guess so many times I've looked at myself and halfheartedly wished I could pick just one or two things to focus my life on--but actually, tying yourself down to stability could lead to your own spiritual or physical or mental or emotional eutrophication. It's important to have air flow in all directions, to prevent harmful inversions. Severe inversions can kill you in less than 48 hours. It's important to have water flow in order to prevent eutrophication and subsequent suffocation of everything. Minor--and sometimes major--changes in life direction can actually be life-saving.

Um, my conclusion: the world needs to stop putting so much emphasis on the need for stability and the ability to predict the future. And we should all just accept the fact that we don't know what's coming--and that even if the air current is annoying and blowing a way we don't particularly like, it's far better than dying from Donora-esque acute respiratory failure.

In other words: change is good. Amen.