All That Is Solid
Introducing Issue #3: AIRBORNE
When we think about climate and ecological crisis, often it’s the cataclysmic events and projections of the future that come to mind. But these crises are unfolding, too, even when the world seems to carry on as “normal”. The engines of industrial production that power the modern economy pour vast amounts of carbon and pollutants into the air, eventually permeating our soil, our water, and even the tissues of our bodies. As David Wallace-Wells, a conversation with whom opens this issue, writes: “a single speck of black carbon, inhaled, won’t stop the heart or poison the lungs, but over time, across populations, the effect is devastating.”
Air pollution kills some ten million people each year. And yet, as Wallace-Wells notes in our conversation, this everyday crisis “has not profoundly transformed our sense of our place in the world.” Several contributions to this issue capture this tension. Adam Almeida and Shruti Iyer document the acute inequalities of air pollution both contemporary and historic, from New York to India. And in a photo-essay, journalists Amelie David and Segolene Ragu report on the fight for clean air and energy in a Beirut under renewed military assault.
The air, however, is more than just a medium through which pollution travels. The skies hum with birds and radio waves, both home to abundant life and host to vast networks of air travel and digital communication. For centuries, as contributor Zsuzsanna Ihar writes, the skies were “a moral and imaginative terrain” of great cultural significance—the subject of wonder, mysticism and tradition. Now, however, they “are being quietly folded into a very different project.” Ihar takes as her subject Scolpaig, a small crofting settlement in the Outer Hebrides, whose skies are being remade by the construction of a highly contested spaceport—just one part of a rush toward new domains of accumulation and military dominance.
It’s not just rockets, of course, remaking the skies. More quotidian forms of air travel, too, have left their mark. As economist Vera Huwe writes, while emissions in many sectors fall—albeit too slowly—in aviation they continue to rise. Tackling this, as Huwe explores, will take more than promises of elusive innovations, and a reckoning with the forces that have shaped the industry’s history.
Air and its many synonyms also play a powerful theoretical or metaphorical role in environmental politics. Literature scholar Mae Losasso argues that the very concept of “the environment” has its roots in the airborne chemical weapons of the First World War; since then, she writes, breath has been an increasingly potent site of both injustice and political mobilisation. For Cecilia Rikap, air is tethered to climate politics by the explosive growth of cloud computing, and Big Tech’s creation of a digital walled garden of climate data and information services. Per Rikap’s research, through control over information, tech giants are not only expanding their power over the design of future energy systems, but shaping public understanding of climate change—and our responses to it.
For Drew Pendergrass, it is the idea and frequent misuse of “complexity” that demands a reckoning. From its roots in physical science, he explores how the concept was weaponised by neoliberal thinkers to advocate for the superiority of the market. But as Pendergrass argues, the enormous complexity of both climate change and social systems is not cause for throwing up our hands and leaving the future to market forces; instead, complexity demands a commitment to planning to rescue the future.
As, at the time of writing, a needless war of profound human and ecological devastation continues to unfold in the Middle East, already uneven progress toward and weak commitments to a decarbonized future seem more fragile than ever. In this context, as contributor Natasha Heenan writes: “we must be clear that there are limits to what people, other animals and the broader ecologies we are all embedded within can feasibly adapt to.” In a stirring personal account of Australia’s bushfires and an exploration of technologies from carbon capture to marine cloud brightening, she argues that we must “move beyond interventionist vs. non-interventionist thinking…accepting responsibility for our species’ unique collective capacity to produce the climate,” and embracing a politics of climate repair.
“All that is solid melts into air,” Marx wrote, “all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Facing those real conditions is the necessary work of building a different world, and requires us to think, as the contributors to this issue have done, with and through the air around us.