The air I breathe

The starting point of our research is the question about how it is to grow up within the contemporary atmosphere. Atmosphere is a notion that refers to feelings and moods emerging in situations, yet it can also mean the physical atmosphere of the Earth. “The air I breathe” is both an affective and material dimension of climate change and extreme weather events. This is how Blanche Verlie and Astrida Neimanis think in their article Breathing climate crisis, talking about climate change as a multispecies crisis of breathing.

During a scout excursion, we do breathing experiments with children. It is lovely and cold spring weather. Leafless trees and evergreen fir trees surround us when we are sitting in the forest, in the yard of an old cabin.

First, I tell Eva's story about air to the children. Artist Eva Bubla has written a poetic description of air based on scientific knowledge as part of their artwork Designated breathing zone. The air is “I” in the poem. I heard the poem for the first time in a workshop for researchers where we studied microbes through breathing.    

I am aware that the poem stays largely mysterious. That doesn’t matter. I read the poem slowly, and we get absorbed in it in the middle of the forest. As the poem is read, we start paying more attention to our breathing. The poem has sharpened our senses.

Then the breathing experiment. Eyes closed, counting to four, in and out. We talk about how air is not just air. To demonstrate that, I ask the children to form their hands into a cup and breathe into it. In the cold air, we perceive intensely different smells and the warmth rising from the depths of our own bodies. 

I talk to the children about microbes. Fungi, for instance, are everywhere. In one rain drop, there may be thousands or millions invisible fungi or fungal spores. Air is not just air, it is a multispecies material blend. So, even now as we breathe in, our lungs filling with the cold sping air, our bodies are filled with other organisms and all kinds of stuff.

How could the multispecies nature of air be noticed? A smell carried into nostrils with air tells about substances blended in the air and other-than-human life, we ponder with the children. I ask the children to head into the forest to search for smells.

And then they come with their smell findings.

“I smelled burned firewood.”

“I smelled a fir tree.”

“I smelled Aino.”

-What did it smell like?

“It smelled like Aino and someone else in our class.”

“I smelled horse poo!”

“It smelled lovely!”

“Like stables and horses and manure and lovely!”

Air is a contact zone of more-than-human connections. It is filled with materials, tiny bodies, emotions, affective connections, and memories.