Over the Christmas holidays, I left Melbourne to spend a few weeks in Sweden with my family. A few days before my return to Melbourne I was reached by the news that Melbourne was experiencing reduced air-quality due to drifting smoke from the large bushfires along the Victorian coast. As I landed in Melbourne a few days later, the air quality was very bad. It was the morning on the 15th of January, the air was glimmering yellow in the morning light and it tasted off. Although air is necessary for survival, breathing is an unconscious reflex which is often forgotten about. However, Choy reminds us that in places where air quality is bad, it becomes a topic of medical, political and social importance. Decreased air quality forces us to think about the atmosphere in more concrete ways. I know that for me, to check the air quality in my neighbourhood has now become a regular part of my morning routine. I have also downloaded an app which gives me daily updates, similar to weather notifications. Apart from employing such technological means of control, I am increasingly aware of the sight, taste and smell of the air. Preferably, air should not be seen or tasted but during bad days it is like you can see the dust and the chemical particles moving in the air, smell dirt in the wind and sense the minute particles through your taste buds. Twice so far, I have run around my house at night whiffing, after having detected an unusual smell, only to draw the conclusion that it must be coming from the air outside.
So, at least for me, the fact that air quality has become an issue in the city where I live is making me aware of air in ways that I previously was not. In addition, the fact that the air quality is not constant but rather erratic and changing intensifies this experience. A few years back I spent some months in Mexico City. At the time I would sometimes hear reports of the damage of breathing the air there being equivalent to smoking a packet of cigarettes a day or something to that effect. That is not a pleasant thing to hear but something that I quietly accepted and mostly avoided thinking about. The bad air was constant and largely due to the compact and laxly regulated traffic in the city. Nonetheless, the consistency of the air allowed me, for the most part, to forget about it. Similarly, recently I was complaining to my partner about the bad air in Melbourne and he, who had just returned from a trip to his hometown Dhaka, Bangladesh, answered by telling me about the air quality in Dhaka which often reaches hazardous levels. This of course does not stop people from going about their daily activities and I highly doubt they check the air-quality index each morning. Since, I believe, once again, the air quality is always pretty bad. In contrast, recent bad air in Melbourne has been a temporary and varying condition. ‘Hazardous’ air in the morning might be ‘moderate’ in the afternoon and ‘good’ the next day. Although the air quality has been good for a while, before going for a run I check the air to make sure that it hasn’t decreased.
Whether this acute attention to air would last even if the air quality continued to fluctuate, I do not know. Perhaps even that we would get used to. But for now, many people around Melbourne are on hyperalert for bad air and hazardous conditions as bushfires around the state are expected to burn all summer. This puts us in touch with air and the atmosphere within which air circulates in new, terrifying and exciting ways. Whether this attunement to air will lead to a change in behaviour or stricter carbon emission targets, is yet too early to say. What is clear is that we now exist in an atmosphere of increased climate urgency, which is making many people realise that climate change is affecting us here and now, not only there and then.
Atmospheres of Change 