A Whole New Relationship with the Air
Lectures on Ventilation (1869). Lewis W. Leeds.
Tuukka Toivonen July 8, 2024
“-The shifting clouds, the endless colors of dawn, rainbows and fog: All this is a form of everyday magic. This is the magic of the real, not the supernatural. But to really notice it, our own perception must shift a little.” Per Espen Stoknes
I vividly remember the day when my assumptions about the air became seriously disturbed.
One winter Monday a few years ago, air pollution indicators in London hit troubling levels. The city was left unusually dark and gloomy by a thick, impenetrable cloud of fog that tightly hugged its streets, schoolyards, office blocks and gardens. Residents were alerted to the dangers of the situation and asked to stay indoors where possible. For many, this was an abrupt induction to how it feels like when the air becomes hostile.
On the several smoggy days that followed, my initial reaction was to try to reclaim a modicum of control by firmly shutting all the windows and vents, staying at home when not lecturing at university and wearing a mask when I absolutely needed to go outdoors. Whatever sense of calm and relief this offered, the effects were at best temporary.
I still tasted the sinister flavor of heavy metal particles too often for comfort. Walking outdoors, it sometimes felt like a thousand tiny blades of steel were cutting their way through my airways with abandon. On the worst days, I was generally unwell and lethargic. This confrontation with hostile air triggered a cycle that blurred the line between what was ‘real’ and what was not, for I had only the news and my increasingly confused bodily signals to go on. I began to look for a way to restore my previous sense of normalcy, or the ability to once again take the air for granted without having to think about its movements, qualities, or problems.
Balloon-Prospect, Airopaidia (1786). Thomas Baldwin.
Soon after that dark Monday, I had the opportunity to meet the energetic founder of a new technology company that promised to offer a citizen-led approach to tackling anxieties about the air. They sought to empower people with the tools to track the shifting currents of air quality on a moment-by-moment basis, not only in their own cities or districts but their own neighborhoods. Using an app that made live air quality data highly accessible, citizens with smartphones could choose healthier behaviors and routes on smoggy days, removing unnecessary concerns when the air was verifiably safe. This was a creative company that had recently struck up an unlikely collaboration with an army of pigeons in East London, equipping them with tiny backpacks to transmit live air quality data from the skies above.
I became an avid user of the company’s app and found it a useful aide for planning my day-to-day urban existence. Yet, something still did not feel entirely right. Some of my concerns for the air lingered and remained a quiet source of anxiety. Implicitly, I continued to view the air not in benevolent terms, but as a threatening presence, a potential killer. The standard terminology of environmental science typically used to gain a grasp on problems of the air were of limited help when trying to resolve or at least process the anxieties I shared above. Having had my assumptions broken, I struggled to see how one might approach the air in some alternative way that was more whole, more resonant, and more healing.
Several years after the initial crumbling of my beliefs about the air, I was introduced to the work of Norwegian psychologist, economist and philosopher Per Espen Stoknes that happens to speak precisely to this question. Stoknes suggests that we start by approaching the air’s way of being in a much more holistic sense. To do this, we simply start by using our senses to connect with the air in the here and now. How does the movement of the air feel on your skin? How does the air smell? Does it carry the wonderful fragrance of flowers or fresh leaves outside your window or a cocktail of unpleasant odors from a road or a factory? What sounds does it make? Is there something the air is signaling to you, something it is trying to tell you? The key is to begin by reclaiming our embodied experience of the air, to help ground our new understandings and to see how, in a real sense, the air mediates everything we do.
“Air keeps us alive moment-to-moment. It allows us to breathe in the same ancient argon molecules once respired by the Buddha and many extinct species of animals.”
Building on sensory perceptions, it becomes easier to treat the air as something much more than a passive object, external to us and our human world. The air starts to reveal its character as something that is animate, intelligent, even imaginative – an entity that is much more alive than we normally recognize. As Stoknes provocatively suggests, much like the Navajo’s ‘Holy Wind’, we may even begin to perceive the possibility that the living air constitutes a kind of a mind that we get to participate in, and that if we listen, has volumes to teach us.
To cultivate a richer relationship with the air, one must go beyond a casual understanding of breathing to recognize how profoundly it connects us to the world. Our very existence is bound up with the air’s way of being:
“Yet the air isn’t just what we breathe into our lungs, briefly visiting us before we exhale it. It is also our primary link to the world. It fully envelops us, from the soles of our feet to each hair on the top of our head, from the day we draw our first breath to beyond our death. It holds us gently, with a benign embrace without which our bodies would fall apart. To be born is to enter the air. To be is to be in the air.”
(From Stoknes’ What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action, 2015).
Air (1580-1584). Adriaen Collaert after Maerten de Vos.
Air keeps us alive moment-to-moment. It allows us to breathe in the same ancient argon molecules once respired by the Buddha and many extinct species of animals. It protects us as an unthinkably thin layer of film woven around our delicate blue planet. As soon as we stop and think, suddenly the air appears (literally) filled with wonder. There is no longer a scarcity of material or a shortage of inspiration for reimagining our relationship with the air.
These fresh perspectives having enriched my imagination, one thing became painfully obvious: on that dark Monday in London several years ago, I only had a relationship with the air when it asserted itself as a problem. I was a living, breathing representative of the ways of thinking that positioned humans as fundamentally separate from the more-than-human world.
It was ultimately this deeper, insidious thought structure that began to fracture in the smog and that I struggled to find alternatives for thereafter. This produced a lingering sense of discomfort with and alienation in relation to the air that I had entered at birth and that had mediated everything I had done in my life.
Detail of a Wind Cherub, c.1650.
What cried out for more attention within me was this elementary disconnect. I now see that what I was yearning for, as a basis for a more satisfying approach to my concerns, was a fuller, more genuine relationship with the air. One that was appreciative of its aliveness, its quirks and its immeasurable blessings. What I needed was not a rosier worldview somehow magically cleansed of all serious and complex problems but rather a rinsing of the mind from artificial notions of a separation between humans and nature. In the end, I had to let go of the ingrained assumption that it was the air – or air pollution, narrowly defined – that was the problem.
Given just how intrinsically our entire existence is bound up with that of the air across all levels of life, it is astonishing how little attention we pay to it beyond the specific, externalized ‘slices’ that we label as problems (in a way that reinforces the assumed separation of humans from the rest of the living world). We have denied the reciprocal nature of our relationship with the air by refusing to approach it in a way that makes full use of all our perceptual instruments – scientific, sensuous, imaginative – and this has meant we have been unable to embrace the full brilliance of the living air.
By viewing the air and the more-than-human world as alive – and taking the time to perceive it as richly as we can – we can re-establish a symbiotic relationship that is whole and integrated, even in the face of troubling human-made particulates that permeate the air that permeates us. Although only having just started to take in the vast new possibilities stirred by this switch in perspective, I sense that the assumptions that caused my original anxieties have already vanished – seemingly into thin air.
Tuukka Toivonen, Ph.D. (Oxon.) is a sociologist interested in ways of being, relating and creating that can help us to reconnect with – and regenerate – the living world. Alongside his academic research, Tuukka works directly with emerging regenerative designers and startups in the creative, material innovation and technology sectors.
