Welcome to the worldwide_pollution_monitor!
Is your air and water clean? This is a question we can usually answer very roughly - the smell of the air, the taste of the water. A bad smell prompts us to avoid a place, a bad taste tells us of danger.
But things are more complex in this day and age of manufacturing. There are many sources of pollution, and they are hard to track. A farmer using too much fertilizer won't be penalized for violating standards, because we can't know where the source of the pollution is. The same goes for a plant that produces any of a myriad of products - paper with its phenol-formaldehyde, a plant by accident switches from inlet to outlet (I was present when this happened, and the town didn't notice and even if they had, there would be no way to follow up).
I am concerned about the lack of accountability when it comes to producing pollution. We've gotten a lot better, but there are simply far more individuals and factories producing, and we only check every so often for violations. It isn't really the factory's fault, or the farmer's fault, or the individual's fault. We simply are pushing ourselves hard to produce with very little down time, with very high efficiency. This isn't free.
So what can we do about this problem?
It seems that the ideal solution would allow real-time pollution information that is easily accessible - to citizen, lawmaker, and company - without depending on any of them.
This project, worldwide_pollution_monitor, attempts to create an ad-hoc real-time data collection infrastructure which anyone can contribute to, can be viewed in a standardized way, and is scaleable to a worldwide scale without loss of usable information.
The other half of the problem, the pollution sensor producing real-time data, is beginning to be addressed by unsung heroes that care deeply about our planet and your safety. This is a far more difficult problem, as it requires intense research and high funding as well as handling of dangerous compounds.