ABSTRACT
Beyond the legal limits of Mexico City’s self-destructive sprawl, the view from the mountainside neighborhood of El Zacaton was breathtaking—literally. A photochemical soup spread across the urban valley 1,500 feet below. Skyscrapers, factories, highways, and homes loomed grayish-brown through translucent smog as more than twenty million people and three million cars coughed, choked, and gasped their way through ozone levels more than double those considered safe for humans. The cloud spread across the horizon, burning eyes and lungs even up in fast-growing El Zacaton (the Pasture), where construction workers, oblivious, continued carving the city deeper into one of its few remaining forests, illegally building makeshift homes to accommodate a population boom that brings 1,000 new residents to Mexico City each day. 1
