More water hangs over the Amazon Rainforest than passes through its rivers in a day. The air is physical. It’s closer to an ocean than to the vacuum of space. That’s an easy fact to forget. The air around us goes unnoticed unless, generally speaking, it’s foggy, causing turbulence, or filled with smoke.
But during the Anthropocene—a geological reckoning that forces us to confront the impact our species imposes upon the Earth—the air has never felt more material. Rising temperatures saturate it with water molecules and smog chokes sunless skies above major cities. If you’ve ever felt the oppression of a heat wave then you know just how thick air’s materiality can become.
We're fairly bad at perceiving the ecological processes and physical realities that sustain life. Air is a slow, 2.3-billion year unraveling byproduct of oxygenating organisms. Yet in the last few centuries—not even a blink in Earth time—we’ve thrown our carbon and fume-filled additions to the mix. The result is a greater emergence of the invisible threads that hold our world together. You don’t think much about the ice shelves until they collapse, and breathing is automatic until you’re fighting for air.
It’s easy to take that which you can’t see for granted. We may see through air but it doesn’t see through us. Our actions are etched into the atmospheric firmament. That reality is now well-understood. As the Anthopocene illuminates the formerly invisible, the question, then, is whether we’ll adapt to this strange new world as “our new nature,” or lament what we’ve lost? Will we stay in our air conditioned and filtered homes, eyes glued to VR, or step into the dampened sunshine and inhale deeply the acrid smoke?
Images and text included in an upcoming Invict/us magazine issue.