Sky

Our connections to the sky here can be very easily demonstrated. Take one moment to become aware of something which most of us very seldom notice: breathing.

We breathe in, our lungs fill with that same beautiful winter blue sky. Every moment of the day we breathe it in and out. What is this lung-full made of? What is it? Seen chemically it's:

So it's not just this invisible thing that we're in, it's a real substance and we can think of it as a bit like a thin soup. We breath in and bring this gas soup onto the moist surface of our lungs. Inside there it's damp and it connects to the air. Our lives are plugged into the sky via our lungs. It is such an obvious connection but we don't see it very often, we don't take the time to notice our breathing very often. Without the air, in a vacuum or in deep space we'd last perhaps three seconds. We need the air very badly.

Also, if the air were very different, lets say it was like the atmosphere of any of the other planets in the solar system, we wouldn't last very long. We'd be brain dead in perhaps three minutes. So we don't just need the air, we need a particular kind of air. The kind that, ideally, we have.

Notice your breath again. This air that we depend on, how does it get like this? Well, to over-simplify:

	green plants use carbon dioxide and give off oxygen and they borrow energy from sunlight to do that.
	Animals and plants breathe, taking oxygen and putting back carbon dioxide
	Minerals and dead organic matter are oxidizing and reacting with the sky.
	Factories and power stations, cars and all the things that we do, add a wide spectrum of different chemicals.
	Sunlight provides energy for a host of chemical reactions in the air

So, it's a cycle. The sky is in a state of constant change, and it is living systems which maintain the balance at levels which are supportive of life.

Of course, we individuals also change the nature of the sky. We take oxygen and give back carbon dioxide and the moisture and whatever compounds make up our scent and so on. This is part of what is meant when we say that we are constantly interacting with our environment. We breath in and out, the sky is not separate from us. Can we say this is me, maybe up to the end of my nose, and the rest of it is something else, something that is not me? Our dependence on air makes the borders of what we see as our self start to look a little rubbery.

Let's look at air from a different perspective seeing the earth's atmosphere, the enormous sky. We can go outside and look up, and the sky seems endless. We can think of the planet as this huge drop of molten metal and rock, orbiting the sun in space. There is a thin surface around it, thinner, in proportion, than the peel on an apple. That's the crust of the earth, the base of our human life. There is also a little bit of water. If you took a huge ball-bearing and breathed onto it, your breath would deposit a thin misting of moisture, proportionately about the thickness of the oceans on the globe of the earth.

And then there is this thin little veil of air, of sky. We have all seen this sky from above in satellite pictures, pictures taken from the moon, perhaps images used in television weather broadcasts; those beautiful spiral patterns of cloud moving across the blue ocean and dark land. The breathable air is very thin, only a few kilometers. Fifty kilometers up, satellites orbit in a hard vacuum.

So there is this thin layer of air that we are changing, that we are interacting with and that's produced by living systems. The sky's make-up didn't just happen, wasn't just given like we have it now. It was made by living things over billions of years. And living things keep it like it is. The mix of gases would be very different if it weren't for living things. This basic idea was what started Lovelock formulating his Gaia Hypothesis. Although there is some argument about it's exact contents, it is clear that the earth's atmosphere was once very different. It was thought to be made of substances like methane, ammonia and various other things and would kill us pretty swiftly. Living systems have evolved and changed the atmosphere and kept it regulated over billions of years.

Let's consider a typical South African town or city. What do we see? The place can be divided up into various areas:

	There will be a central business district where the air will mainly be spiced with traffic fumes. There will be a few trees, and perhaps parks and civic gardens, but these will be inadequate to clean the traffic fumes from the air. In many South African cities (Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg) the urban smog is visible, an ugly brown blanket over the city. This air pollution, known as photo-chemical smog often reaches concentrations which are dangerous to people. All people in the city will be poisoned, to some extent, by its air. Those who can afford air-conditioning or air filtration, may suffer less from city pollution than others. Those working outdoors will suffer most.
	There will be one or more industrial areas, where the city's manufacturing and so on happens. The air in these areas, along with rivers and "wasteland", will typically be used as a dumping place for unwanted by-products of various industrial processes. This means that the industrial area will probably be an unpleasant place to be (it will smell bad) as well as unhealthy (people may get sick from being in such areas.)
	There will be suburbs where the wealthy and moderately wealthy people live. The suburbs will typically have many gardens and trees, and will be situated at some distance from the worst industries. The quality of the air will be fairly good. The suburbs will have electricity, so it will not be necessary for the inhabitants to burn wood or coal for cooking and heating.
	There will be one or more townships, usually near to the industrial areas. Because townships have no electrification, in winter they are likely to be covered in a pall of coal and wood smoke. The roads may not be surfaced, so the air will contain more dust than in other areas. Being near industry, industrial pollutants will spill over into the township (air is not interested in fences).

So we can see that the air is not the same for everyone. Although poisons put into the air will reach everywhere in the end, and are ultimately harmful to everyone, (Lovelock found CFC's, the ozone destroying chemicals, at the South Pole), people in some areas suffer more from poisons in the air than people in other areas. This is because of the concentration of the poisons.

Consider what happens when factories poison the air or when people smoke in the same room as you. If you think of the air as the gas part of yourself, as the airy part of your being, it takes on a different meaning. People are poisoning us, our society is poisoning us. We need to heal ourselves, and part of that healing must be to make our air whole.

?	What sort of social and economic systems allow people to put poison into the atmosphere?
?	Do you know of a system which doesn't?
?	Can you imagine such a society or system?
?	Who benefits from the poisons that go into the air (and from the things being made which have these poisons as by-products?)
?	Who benefits least?
?	Who benefits most?
?	Why must some people suffer more from atmospheric pollution than others?
?	Who suffers most?
?	Who suffers least?
?	If we see the air as part of our own self, how does that affect our understanding of air pollution?
?	Would you let someone put poison on your hand or in your mouth?

	It starts to make less sense to think of living things and some atmosphere that they somehow are inside of.
	It seems to make more sense to think of a planetary atmosphere regulator, a great big system that keeps the air working, that keeps it the way that life needs it to be.
	So it's not really two separate entities. It is not us up to the end of our noses and everything else out there, somehow miraculously given. It's really a single system.

That brings us back to us, the sky-breathers.
We could imagine ourselves as

systems,
rather than separate entities -
human animals with lungs full of sky.

	various industrial chemicals,
	various pollutants,
	traces of smoke from fires,
	stuff from the air conditioner,
	all the little solid particles you can see when the sunlight shines on air, drifting around,
	plant and fungus spores,
	pollens,
	little animals like dust mites,
	bacteria,
	bits of human skin, hair and so on...

	mostly nitrogen,
	about a fifth volume of oxygen
	some traces of other gases, carbon dioxide, argon, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and so on and on.