I
During a lecture with undergraduate students in late October 2019, I was informed that the university student body president had reached out to university authorities requesting the cancellation of classes due to significant air pollution. The university in question is located in western Uttar Pradesh, at the very tip of the Delhi NCR expanse. This location positions the university campus just beyond the urban conglomerates of Noida and Greater Noida that are within a range of 70 KM from New Delhi. Being a residential university, students need to cover the distance between their hostel rooms and the academic blocks to attend classes, which is possible on foot. It was explained to me that the request had been denied and it did not go down well with most students, as they believed that they were being forced to sit in the dangerous air in my classroom.
This vignette has remained etched in my memory not only because it led to a long conversation in class (steering far from the intended lecture content of the day), but also because I cannot help registering that such a request would have been unfathomable sixteen years ago when I was a young undergraduate student in Delhi University. And yet, no student in my classroom found it the least bit extraordinary to demand suspension of lectures due to polluted air. What had happened in the interim short span of 16 years? Let me attempt to sum up the discussion that followed in class by addressing two aspects – what does it mean to live with ‘bad air’ and what factors led the student body to designate the request as a legitimate ask?
I use the preposition ‘with’ to designate our relationship to air for two reasons. Firstly, the consciousness of bad air is the realization that we are, in fact, always surrounded by air and that given the current quality of air, it can have detrimental effects on our health. This is not to say that we were not aware of living in or breathing air before but the realisation of its effects on us lends a physicality to this awareness and is symbolic of a rude awakening of constantly being conscious of the air we live in.
Timothy Morton uses Sartre’s notion of viscosity to explain this sort of a relationship by addressing our realization of the nearness to nuclear blast emissions and global warming. For Sartre, viscosity is how a hand feels when it plunges into a large jar of honey. The important point is that viscosity is not indicative of a leap that has been made into the honey, but consists of the realization that we are already inside the honey; it envelops and penetrates our very existence. Other scholars have interpreted what I understand as our intimacy with air through conceptual categories such as ‘breathers’ as offered by Timothy Choy to connote that while we all breathe air to live, there are unaccounted costs of breathing good or bad air. Similarly, Joseph Masco argues that the citizen is less a national subject and more of an earth dweller, by simply being a breather, such that we cannot escape air anywhere and that air envelopes the entire planet. In making these claims these scholars also seek to highlight an additional quality of living with air – attributing air an agentive quality. Humans have known that they need air to live, but the contemporary move has been to acknowledge a constant heightened perception of this erstwhile taken for granted fact. This is made more evocative in that the same air that allows us to live can have equally detrimental effects on our ability to live. The point is that in realizing this intimacy with air, we cannot escape it and therefore must be conscious of how it impregnates psychic as much as bodily cognition on a constant, everyday basis. At the psychic level, we are made to be conscious of and literally think about the quality of air we are breathing in. At the bodily level, through breath the air we live with creeps through our bodily interiors to settle in our lungs and even penetrates our blood stream. This recent awareness of our relationship with the air we breathe is a result of a number of factors, significant among which are the culmination of science and the policy on air pollution globally.
Even though efforts to tackle air pollution in New Delhi can be traced to the change of a diesel based public transport system to CNG in the 1990s and as far back as the colonial period; it was in May 2014 for the first time that New Delhi became infamous for having turned into the most polluted city in the world. Though here I present the case of New Delhi, it is possible to trace air pollution related reforms in other Indian cities too starting from the colonial period. For New Delhi, becoming the most polluted city in the world was ‘achieved’ following the release of a WHO database detailing annual averages of pollution levels in cities across the globe. Since 2014, there has been increasing traction in science, policy and advocacy on air pollution in New Delhi, India, other parts of the world, and many Indian cities have consistently remained amongst the most polluted cities in the world. Historically, the quantification of air pollution was made possible through developments in science that converted air from matter to material, that is, there was a move from the individual sensorial perception of the quality of air in relation to place – through smell, temperature and movement – to scientifically accurate standards that qualified the quality of air. The scientific assessment makes the quality of air an index that is available for comparison and allows for material and symbolic means to facilitate communication and policy. Undoubtedly, more and more cities globally are being called ‘polluted’ on the basis of air quality and the heightened attention this has received in print and electronic media has been seminal in people becoming more acutely conscious of the air they live with and its effects on their quality of life and health. The proliferation of this kind of discourse in the recent past has been instrumental in pushing the student body of the university to make a claim for the suspension of classes on account of the bad air quality.
The second way in which I use ‘with’ to talk about our relationship to air is to point out the materiality of air. There is one singular layer of air that envelopes the Earth, but within this thin film in which all living and breathing species live, the constituents of air are in a constant process of movement. Multifarious gases and particulate matter – (particulates or particulate matter is a term used to describe air pollution. They are a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets found in the air that come in a variety of sizes and can be composed of many types of materials and chemicals) – are in a constant process of swirling, flowing, condensing and then lifting to drift again. Freely flowing air (imbued with all its constituents) encodes its own force that can be experienced in varying degrees of velocity and the expanses it can travel over – a city, across states, nations and even continents – carrying and mixing with all it encounters along the way. In other words, saying that we live with air is a means to afford and acknowledge this agentive quality of air and all it includes. Encoded in living ‘with’ air, is the acceptance of the fact that the air exists independent of us, it has its own identity which deeply impacts but, in most cases, escapes any form of human control in varying scales – from the air in a room to the layer of air enveloping the planet that allows for the possibility of life.
It was this aspect of the materiality of air that occupied the better part of the classroom discussion in response to the request to suspend classes on account of bad air quality being denied. I asked students if they thought they could escape the air quality in the second half of October if they had remained in their hostel rooms? Many of them acknowledged that they had not considered this notion. This was not surprising at all, as the realization of living with air or becoming conscious of the effects that air can have on our ability to live, is often not thought of along with questions about the kind of a material medium the air is. Most homes or indoor spaces in India are not airtight. This is not only the result of the country being predominantly hot and tropical, but is also rooted in the importance placed on ideas of ventilation and the possibility of free movement of air within the living space – as a means to ensure that ‘closed’ spaces particularly always get access to ‘fresh’ air from the outside. This has meant that the need to make a space air tight was not taken seriously until very recently, when discourse on air pollution picked up. There are now a range of private companies that convert living spaces into air tight spaces lined with air purifiers and filters to constantly clean indoor air. Undoubtedly these services are costly and can only be afforded by a select few, but it must also be acknowledged that even this is not a complete solution. The human body is a breathing body that must move from indoor spaces (that could be controlled for air quality) to the outdoors and then into other indoor spaces where the air is not or cannot be managed. The implication here is not only that we must live with air as realized in the notion of ‘the breathing body’, but that the flow, distribution, and filtering of air is not at all easy to control.
For example, an effective way to filter clean air into the body is by wearing well sealed N95 masks, but even these cannot be worn throughout the day. Further, these masks are costly and cannot be afforded by everyone. The classroom discussion in question was in pre-COVID times, so masks were not prevalent in the way they are now. Besides, a double layered cotton or surgical mask is not enough to prevent the breathing in of particulate matter, even though it may be an efficient defence against the transmission of the COVID-19 virus. In other words, due to the nature of particulates and gases that make up the air, the science and transmission of the virus is quite different from the way that bad air enters human lungs and then the cardiovascular system through breath. Of course, today we have companies which are marketing and selling masks that aid in preventing both the virus and air pollution from being breathed in, but the mere fact that there are specific (often costly and not easily available) masks being marketed in such a way, emphasises the point that the transmission of the virus and air pollution have different trajectories. So, to come back to my original premise, unless students chose to stay indoors wearing N 95 masks on that day in October 2019, even if they had stayed in their hostel rooms, they would not have been able to escape the dangerous air looming in the university campus that enveloped us as we talked, carried out our daily activities and breathed.
II
Carson has shown how historians and social anthropologists have responded to 21st century environmental anxieties by forging a new consensus that, the ‘atmosphere’ is not just the English word that could designate the ‘mood of a place’ or the ‘prevailing sentiment’, but the physical gaseous, layer enveloping the Earth, – an object of human knowledge and a historical force in its own right. As such, there is compelling scholarly work (such as Edwards) that qualifies how the idea of the atmosphere was made possible, and how it culminated in the notion of a planetary climate as a single system enveloping the Earth. We may have learnt in our science or environmental studies textbook in school that the Earth’s atmosphere is made of layers of gases that envelope the planet and are held in place by gravity, but this understanding was established through a long and laborious process amongst scientists globally that began in the 19th century and went through many phases of reassessment, friction and collaboration to result in the possibility of envisaging a singular planetary climate. Today, climate models or general circulation models are the best tools scientists have, to understand, represent and study climate. Climate models utilize quantitative methods to simulate the interactions of the important drivers of climate change. They are used for a variety of purposes from the study of the dynamics of the climate system to projections of future climate. This notion of climate has developed over time as it was only in the 19th and 20th centuries that climate came to be envisioned as a fluid and dynamic system that, though planetary in scale, interacts and effects local weather patterns as well. Scientists continue to try and understand the complexity of the planetary climate to better comprehend what future scenarios await us.
It is this possibility of understanding the planetary climate as a singular, dynamic and complicated system that has placed us in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is the geological epoch that is characterized by human actions as a collective being capable, of shaping Earth systems, at par with non-human forces. Scholars from the social sciences and humanities have called into question the category of a uniform human or the Anthropos in the coinage of the current geological epoch as the Anthropocene. While these critiques are relevant, the more interesting effect the category of the Anthropocene has had is the emphasis it has placed on human-atmospheric relations. Climate scientists have argued that the anthropogenic moment is “nowhere more evident than in the atmosphere”. This means that any social science and humanities engagement that seeks to understand what is happening in our contemporary worlds through everything that is emblematic of the Anthropocene, must take human-atmospheric relations seriously. It is this emphasis that is reconceptualising the questions social science and humanities scholarship consider worthy of investigation and driving home the realisation that in order to understand the planetary climate and its implication on how we live, we must take the atmosphere as a worthy and significant category for analysis. In this sense, the atmosphere as an object of study is exerting a historical force in the disciplines of social science and humanities.
I do not, however, claim that understandings of the atmosphere did not exist prior to the construction of the planetary climate by climate science. In fact, scholars agree that the climate is as much a conceptual construction as a tangible entity. This means that over time climate science had led to the construction of the idea of the planetary climate, but simultaneously climate is also a material, tangible entity. The warmth on the back of my neck on a sunny day is as much a manifestation of climate as the melting glaciers in Greenland. Both of these are tangible and material – the back of my neck feels warm, which I can touch with my hands and feel the warmth. Similarly, it is possible to see how sea levels are rising on account of glaciers melting and this too, can be materially documented. On the other hand, the simulations that climate scientists are able to generate in a climate model are attempts to construct the planetary climate conceptually. And so it is, that the planetary climate as we understand it, becomes both materially tangible as well as a conceptual construction. Further, social science and humanities scholars have shown that ideas of weather and climate and their importance existed before the understanding of a singular planetary climate emerged. For instance, weather as studied through wind patterns has been seminal in the understanding of sea routes for trade, in colonial administrations for governing colonies with varied weather conditions, and in traditional medicine knowledge systems in different parts of the world that put forth varied understandings of the importance and effects of the five natural elements, one of which was air.
From this historical perspective, it can be claimed that the climate crisis is, in fact a relatively recent phenomenon that has propelled scholarly interest towards the extremes of scales in terms of expanse and time. In terms of expanse, I mean the evolution of the idea of a climate that is dynamic, fluid and all-encompassing with respect to the Earth. In terms of the scale of time, the implication is two-fold – that of human time and planetary time. By human time, I mean the time period during which the human species has existed on Earth, so that it is important to acknowledge (as I have shown in this section) that historically, ideas of the weather have been intrinsic and specific to all forms of social institutions even before the phenomenon of climate change became a part of our social discourse. The second implication is that of planetary time which transcends the life span of the human species on Earth. Planetary time encompasses all the climatic changes the Earth has gone through over millennia that has ultimately culminated to us being placed in the Anthropocene. The Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago, which represents the scale of planetary time. Human time is much shorter – while our ancestors have been around for about six million years, the modern form of humans only evolved about 200,000 years ago. Civilization as we know it is only about 6,000 years old. The air, in that sense, is not only part of the planetary climate but has been present in changing concentrations of the gases that form the atmosphere for millennia before the human race even appeared on Earth. What is of significance is to recognize, without ignoring the extreme scales of air’s presence, the implications that living with the air is having on our everyday lives today and how our social worlds are being constituted by these processes. It is precisely this dynamic that has been recognized as an important analytical category for social science and humanities investigations in contemporary times. In other words, as I have argued the idea of the atmosphere has been around for centuries, but that in many functional ways it culminated as a planetary system with the scientific assertion of climate change. This propelled social science and humanities scholarship to engage with the atmosphere while being cognizant of its spatial and temporal scales. This means that any investigation of the human-atmospheric relationship as it affects us today must be alert to the way in which the atmosphere emerged as an important conceptual category and has led to the way in which we recognize our intimacy with air today.
III
I moved to the university campus located in western Uttar Pradesh in December 2018 from Delhi. My acquaintances and well-wishers not only from Delhi but also from other parts of the country, consistently asked me – the air must be better there? The question was not surprising given that narratives of the detrimental air quality had been spiraling in electronic and print media over the last few years. Since the university campus is located beyond Greater Noida, it was assumed that the campus was safely away from any urban conglomerate and would hence have better air quality (especially as compared to Delhi). The question about air quality has stayed with me for a number of reason, which I detail here. Firstly, just like the request for suspension of classes due to the detrimental air quality, the question of better air quality in the university campus is something that I could not have imagined being asked 15 years ago. What was also starkly noticeable to me was the marked consistency of the question – everyone who enquired about my move brought it up.
Second, this question was put forth by some along with questions of air quality data and the air quality index (AQI). The AQI is a weighted average that relates levels of pollutants in the air to human health. The range of what ‘healthy’ to ‘severe’ levels are for the AQI is fixed by the national government and varies globally. This is done keeping in mind the state of air in a country, trends of air pollution and designing realistic policy goals for improving air quality. While the numerous digital boards showing AQI across a few metropolitan cities in the country have had little effect on residents in determining their daily activities according to air quality, it would not be unreasonable to say that air pollution has become a much more discussed topic on the news and in everyday conversations in the recent past. This is reflected in mainstream news outlets not only carrying stories about the air quality of cities in the country, but also sharing the levels of pollution in cities, which is often the average AQI of cities over a day. The AQI data can, however, only be generated in cities that have air quality monitoring stations. Such stations are not present in the same numbers or uniformly in terms of technology across cities. Even so it should be acknowledged that today, this data can be accessed for major cities through public and private sources. Of course, there are debates about the reliability of such data, but it is undeniably true that more and more air quality data is being shared on media outlets and other platforms such as mobile applications. The number of healthy air days in a year is a common discussion point on mainstream news channels, while in living room discussions, bodily reactions are increasingly being attributed to the state of the air, and cities in India are being compared on account of which is a better place to live in terms of air quality.
While these narratives have emerged significantly in the recent past and point to a growing consciousness to air quality and its implications on human health, it has not yet matured to the level of taking human-atmospheric relations as seriously as they need to be. The discourse on air quality is caters to urban spaces – which cities are the most polluted. Even the yearly debates on how crop burning in Haryana and Punjab is leading to a deterioration of air quality in the Delhi NCR region, focuses on the air quality in urban conglomerates. The implication is that crop burning in rural parts of the country is a problem as the polluted air so emitted from crop burning makes the air of nearby urban cities foul. Though research has qualified that air pollution is indeed trans-boundary (in some cases travelling far beyond state boundaries to traverse national borders) the impetus remains on understanding how the air of a city is being polluted even if the sources are from other places. This is precisely the implication in the question asked of me when I moved to the university – as the campus is located beyond any city, the air quality should automatically be better.
This leads to yet another way in which the creation of certain spaces by polluting air is imagined. I have tried to indicate how air pollution is predominantly understood as an urban phenomenon in mainstream media. One of the reasons for this is that there is more air quality data being generated in urban spaces. One of the main reasons for this is how air quality policy is enacted and seeks to implement measure to quantify air quality. For instance, in India the Central Pollution Control Board executes and manages a nation-wide programme of ambient air quality monitoring network of air quality monitoring stations known as National Air Quality Monitoring Programme (NAMP). The network consists of 793 operating stations covering 344 cities/towns in 29 states and 6 Union Territories of the country. The point to notice is that the network covers cities, towns and union territories. In other words, for India, there is ambient air quality data only for urban spaces. In order to make the network more representative of air quality across the country in the proposed National Clean Air Program (2019), the central government has indicated that monitoring stations will be expanded to regions beyond cities.
In the WHO database, air pollution is mapped in two sections – ambient air pollution and household air pollution. The logic of the division is that household air pollution refers to air pollution generated by households due to activities such as inefficient bio-fuel burning from cooking in traditional cook stoves. Ambient Air Quality on the other hand refers to air pollution generated by all other outdoor sources of emissions such as vehicles and industrial units. In this understanding ‘outdoor’ is understood as sources outside the ‘household’. The list of most polluted cities in the world is put out by data accumulated from ambient air quality. In other words, air pollution in cities is defined as the pollution caused by sources outside the household. This inherently implies that modern cities such as Delhi have cleaner cooking sources in households such as LPG and electric stoves. Further, air quality monitoring stations that are the source for global data for the WHO are only present in cities in India and this data is taken under ‘ambient air pollution’. Air Quality data in the WHO database deems the ‘urban’ (city) and the ‘rural’ as two separate spaces in codifying ambient and household air pollution separately. The data that is available for household air pollution is a result of development research conducted in rural parts of the country and not a result of the Central Pollution Control Boards’ network of monitoring stations. The discourse on household air pollution has a well-documented history in policy-development initiatives starting with cookstove programs in India in the 1930s, mainly as a response to tackle pressures on forest resources. The interesting point is that these initiatives were undertaken to displace polluted air from inefficient bio-fuel burning from inside the household to outside the household. The programs have largely been proven unsuccessful as they did not lead to adoption of the improved and more efficient fuel burning stoves by target households. Scientific and developmental research prompting the successful uptake of efficient cookstoves is still underway. The result of these initiatives is that there has been a bifurcation of air pollution into ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ with respect to policy and related popular discourse. It could be argued that the split is on the basis of likely sources of air pollution – inefficient bio-fuel burning for cooking and heating needs in the household (rural) and all other sources outside the household (urban) – but I would argue that this sort of reasoning ignores the agentive quality of air and what it means to live with air. Moving air with its varying constituents encodes its own forces and flows through and past cities, states, nations and continents effecting everything it encounters on its way. All air in that sense is ambient, freely floating and mixing around us and travelling beyond boundaries (state, national and bodily) to mix in all that is the atmosphere, and the categories of ‘ambient’ and ‘household’ air pollution do not capture this.
In 2019, UNEP put forth that there is significant scientific proof to establish that air pollution and climate change are two sides of the same coin. Not surprisingly, the possibility of this claim is premised on understanding the planetary climate as a singular, dynamic and complex entity that envelopes our very existence. The air may be better on the outskirts of the Delhi NCR region but we must also be conscious of how we cannot escape the air and what it means to take human-atmospheric relations seriously in the way that we live and shape our future(s). The Anthropocene, in this sense, is most apparent in the atmosphere. Gases and particulate matter are emitted in, mix, travel and make the atmosphere. Being alert to human-atmospheric relations means taking into consideration the iterative processes that operate perpetually at multifarious scales, simultaneously and are encoded in every breath we take, how air penetrates all bodies and the swirling descent and ascent of airborne materials in our intimate immediacies to planetary scales and back.