Tuesday, 5 Jun 2007

ROSTOCK, Germany

If you dress head to foot in black, set cars on fire, launch stones and beer bottles at police, and brave hand-to-hand scuffles amid clouds of tear gas with choppers thundering overhead, best bet is you’ll make the evening news. Which is too bad, because in the case of Saturday’s late-afternoon riots in Rostock, the images of unrest have obscured and altered what most of us adults would have called the real story.

Menace or blessing?

Photo: Irene Pascual

I say adults because the couple of thousand sullen-eyed, peach-fuzz-faced rabble-rousers who formed the Black Bloc averaged, say, 20 years old. Middle-class adolescents still living at home with mom and dad, the young anarchists weren’t the ones who’d spent thousands of hours organizing the Alternative Summit that’s running counter to the official G8 meeting, which starts Wednesday in nearby Heiligendamm. They didn’t arrange Bono’s concert here; nor did they coordinate the peaceful blockades against G8 delegates arriving at Rostock airport; nor set up large-scale encampments around the city; nor promote dozens of lectures and workshops on subjects ranging from immigration and agriculture to militarism, feminism, and global energy strategy.

In short, the Black Bloc lacked the legitimacy to turn a peaceful, well-planned protest into mayhem — yet that’s exactly what they did. But let’s look at it another way; by admitting, for example, that some of us — OK, many of us — go to demonstrations like these nursing the secret hope that things might turn a little rowdy. The hope of feeling, beyond all the costumes, music, and speeches, a greater whiff of excitement. Of being somehow in the fray.

I went to Rostock, I confess, with some pretty big expectations. The media had so fixated on the G8 Summit — from criticism of the seven-mile-long fence built to keep out protesters to speculation about Chancellor Angela Merkel’s standoff with President George Bush over his last-minute climate policy proposal — that the demonstration against it had to be sensational, right?

I had arrived (with my own little global retinue of amigos, which included a Spaniard, a Brazilian, an Englishman, a Mexican, a Colombian, and myself, an American) packed body to body with other protesters on the morning train from Berlin. Chartered buses and trains were pouring in from cities across northern and central Europe, like Zurich and Cologne, Vienna and Munich, Stockholm and Copenhagen. Base camps had materialized around the Rostock region as demonstrators carrying rucksacks and tents and a week’s worth of supplies flooded in.

Putting a face on politics.

Photo: Irene Pascual

A whole cross-section of the continent appeared to have shown up: old men calling for just labor laws, young mothers with strollers marching against climate change, students appealing for fair trade and an end to the Iraq war. Actors dressed in elaborate costumes hoisted masks parodying the G8 leaders. Trumpeters blew horns, drummers beat out rhythms, and trance-music revelers danced as thousands of bodies kept rolling past.

All the big NGO players were represented — WWF, Oxfam, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth — as were the vast array of antis: anti-racists, anti-capitalists, anti-fascists, anti-G8s, anti-about everything you could get your hands on. The wavy, rainbow-colored sea of signs, balloons, and placards — “Down with the G8,” “Stop Privatization,” “International Solidarity” — reflected the position stated simply on one flier: “The world shaped by the dominance of the G8 is a world of war, hunger, social divisions, environmental destruction, and barriers against migrants and refugees.”

Despite the tensions and global concerns prompting the march, up until 3 p.m. the mood was still bright. Heading toward the harbor where concerts were already under way, the protesters continued their relaxed march, by the tens of thousands, in what looked from a distance like a slow, musical, serpentine dance. But the anxious buzz of helicopters overhead was mounting. The green-clad cops were encroaching. Then suddenly, somewhere out of view, a provocation occurred. Instants later, acrid, dense, gray gas filled the streets.

Bodies started running. Police units multiplied, emerging from all corners of the city and sprinting in neat lines toward the harbor where the flare-ups were taking place. There was something epic about the scene: on the waterfront, under the port’s looming cranes, with sirens wailing, music blaring, giant banners and balloons bobbing, the sky threatening rain, and the authorities with their armored vehicles threatening injury.

It didn’t take long for the mainstream crowd to disperse, leaving several thousand young guys and girls clothed in black to engage in the fight. They hurled bottles and fireworks and chunks of concrete that they’d pried up from the street. They smashed bank and car windows, destroyed parking-ticket machines, and lit several cars on fire in what the German magazine Der Spiegel called “an orgy of violence.” Only after many hours and injuries and arrests — after the air became choked with smoke and gas, and after the Black Bloc tired of their showdown with water cannons — did the police restore order.

Close to 1,000 people, nearly half of them police, were reported injured, 50 of them seriously, before the day was through. Some 125 arrests were made. Sunday brought a rest for both sides, but on Monday and Tuesday they were back at it, with street skirmishes and armed conflicts between youth and authorities that led right up to President Bush’s arrival with his entourage. Needless to say, the Alternative Summit’s well-planned schedule — of concerts and lectures, seminars, marches, and non-violence training workshops — was vastly overshadowed by the more media-grabbing conflict.

Give peace a chance.

Photo: Irene Pascual

The Alternative Summit organizers had tried very hard, and almost with success, to show the orderly and thoughtful face of the anti-globalization movement. But what they, and what we all, now have to ask ourselves might be this: If those late-afternoon images of chaos and confrontation hadn’t occurred — if the estimated 80,000 protesters had marched peacefully, vocally, and jubilantly to the demonstration’s conclusion as planned — would the world have even noticed?

It may be, in fact, that the anarchic, violent spirit is already so embedded in the anti-globalization movement that it has become unthinkable for a G8 protest to conclude otherwise.

This spring, in recent weeks especially, the German government seemed to be almost purposefully stoking the public’s anger in the build-up to the summit. After police raided many activists’ homes and offices for information last month, it became known that the collection and use of “scent samples” to track down suspected agitators, a method practiced by the secret police in the former East Germany, was suddenly back in vogue.

Fanning the public’s paranoia, an administrative court ruled last Thursday that demonstrators would not be allowed to come within a four-mile zone of the razor-wire-topped fence that has been erected around Heiligendamm. “The German government has militarized security levels as though they wanted to build a new wall and close themselves in,” said an indignant Renate Künast, Germany’s Green Party chair. The decision overturned a lower court’s ruling that protests could be banned within 200 meters of the security fence, which was built specifically to protect the Kempinski Grand Hotel, where the G8 leaders are scheduled to meet, but not around the entire town. Noting that security costs for the event topped $130 million and that more than 16,000 police officers have been engaged (the largest deployment in Germany since World War II), lawyer Carsten Gericke said the court’s unconstitutional ruling marked “a black day for freedom of assembly in Germany.”

Now I am wondering, as I think back to the cramped train ride Saturday morning when the energy in the air was so palpable but also so peaceful, whether the violence that day might have been foreseen — and if so, how it could have been prevented. When tens of thousands of people are able peacefully to amass and speak, sing and dance with many voices — and ultimately with one — it is a testament to the power and the potential of democracy. But unless we decide clearly, and discover a way to steer our fellow black-clad protesters into the non-violent fold, their actions will continue to define the anti-G8 agenda: fighting, rather than talking about the issues that matter to us most. After all, our heads of state and their policies may still pose our best chance of staving off the serious long-term effects of climate change.

Then again, maybe negotiating calmly with our leaders, on their terms — which is to say, voicing our complaints about poverty and our concerns about global warming, and being virtually ignored — is not what many of us secretly want. In that case, so much for the days of peaceful protest.

Protesters have been up in arms.

Photo: Rosenthal/Greenpeace.

About the only thing most Germans are sure about right now is the dire need to abandon nuclear power, evidenced by the “Switch Off and Rethink” mantra stamped on billboards and in newspapers, buzzing from television sets, and crossing people’s lips throughout the nation. And tough policies enacted by the red-green government have laid an incredible groundwork for that move — not just for Europe’s wealthiest nation to become nuclear-free in the next 15 years, but for renewable-energy suppliers to double their output to provide one-fifth of Germany’s power within the same period. By mid-century, the country expects to derive more than half of its power from renewables.

Pulling the plug on nuclear might be easier said than done if the atomic-friendly Christian Democrats take power in September. Many here anticipate that shift, and fear that the new leaders will try to roll back a half decade of anti-nuclear legislation. If that is the case, though, they’ll be waging an uphill battle. One year after Germany hosted the first-ever international conference on renewable fuels, it’s safe to say the country is in the midst of an energy revolution.

Two Down, Seventeen to Go

Five years ago, the government negotiated a Nuclear Exit Law with the power industry, requiring all 19 of its atomic power stations to shut down by 2020. No easy task for a country of 82 million, which currently relies on nuclear for 30 percent of its power. But it’s happening: in May, authorities began closing down Obrigheim, a plant near the Rhine River in the area south of Frankfurt, making it the second reactor to go off-line.

With a three-part energy mix set to take nuclear’s place — a short-term increase in cleaner coal- and gas-powered plants, an increase in renewable-fuels production, and an emphasis on domestic energy efficiency — economists, engineers, and energy specialists consider Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear a no-brainer. The strategy not only avoids further costs to human health, the climate, and the economy, they say, it makes sense for other key reasons.

“The investment in nuclear plants has been paid off,” says Michael Schroeren, a spokesperson for the German Environment Ministry. “If you prolong their operating time, the companies will simply avoid making the new investments in renewables.” Taking a starker angle, physicist Wolfgang Neumann of Intac, a waste-management organization based in Hannover, argues that “the risk is too great for a terrible accident” on the scale of Chernobyl. Finally, Germany should “get rid of nuclear as fast as possible because, at the moment, there is no solution for the waste,” warns Peter Hennicke, president of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, and Energy.

Waste, want not.

In fact, the issue of waste is burning bright. Germany, engaged since the 1980s in one-way “nuclear tourism” to France and England — where spent fuel was processed and temporarily stored, kept out of sight and out of mind — enacted a ban on nuclear-waste exports earlier this year, as part of the exit agreement. The country must now figure out what to do with thousands of tons of hot radioactive fuel it can no longer get rid of, and which needs 30 to 40 years of cooling before it can be placed in permanent storage.

Between now and 2020, when the last plant is scheduled to close, Germany’s nuclear-power stations expect to produce about 6,000 additional tons of spent fuel. Were the plants’ lifetimes extended until 2040, as the conservative Christian Democrats have hinted at proposing should they triumph in September, the amount of unsecured waste could reach 10,000 tons. Thus far, Germany has failed to find a safe place to store this waste; in 2000, the government slapped a multi-year moratorium on investigations into Gorleben, a salt mine in the north of the country touted as a solution by nuclear engineers but considered insecure by others. Now the nuclear-power companies themselves are responsible for temporarily storing it. They’ll stash it at their retired plants, potentially posing a serious risk of accidents or terrorism.

Another complication in the phaseout is the pollution that will be caused by increased fossil-fuel burning, with coal and natural gas used as “bridging fuels” while renewables gear up. Coal already supplies 50 percent of Germany’s power; natural gas is responsible for nearly 10 percent. In the next 15 years, both will increase. However, some of the big players are making smart proposals — like Vattenfall Utility, which has promised to invest in cleaner coal-powered plants over the next decade.

In recent polls, 80 percent of Germans have voiced support for bringing an end to atomic energy. Now the phaseout’s main resistance is coming from Germany’s four main power producers, who control more than 80 percent of the energy market and all of the nuclear production. They cringe at the prospect of small renewables producers getting a chunk of the pie. But that’s the tack this country is taking — straight into the wind, and with remarkable speed and success, due to another big-time policy move: the Renewable Energy Sources Act.

Try It, You Might Like It

In the last five years, thanks to this singular piece of Green legislation, Germany has doubled its production of renewable fuels like wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, and biomass, which now comprise more than 10 percent of the total energy supply. Using essential free-market principles, the country has begun a radical re-mixing of its energy system which, if things go as planned or better, means Germany will be running on at least 65 percent renewables by mid-century.

Solar grows in a Bavarian field.

Photo: PowerLight Corporation.

Already, Germany is the leading producer of wind power, controlling 40 percent of the global market and employing 35,000 people in an industry that has seen production costs plummet. The country is second behind Japan in solar-energy production, hosting massive facilities in sun-filled Bavaria, while boosting ties to growing solar-power production markets in places like Spain and the Middle East. In terms of plain workforce numbers, alternative-energy outfits in Germany employ around 130,000, three times as many as nuclear.

And the encouragement keeps on coming. A key feature of the energy act is its “feed-in tariff,” which stipulates a fixed, higher price paid by transmission companies to producers of renewable fuels for every kilowatt-hour of clean energy they feed into the grid. The extra cost is then tacked onto consumers’ monthly power bills. The genius of the subsidy is that it forces consumers, not companies or the government, to foot the direct extra cost of producing renewable energy — but at a price they hardly feel.

For example, the average German household today pays an extra 0.4 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity it receives from wind, adding a modest total of about $17 to the yearly power bill. By 2020, renewables are expected to power 20 percent of the country, and the consumer household tax is likely to rise one cent per kilowatt-hour or less — a cost that economists say will hardly be felt, thanks to improvements in energy use and efficiency. (Demographic changes could also reduce energy needs in Germany, as the population is expected to drop as much as 15 percent by 2050.)

This ambitious plan for cutting energy use reflects the last challenge Germany faces to successfully rid itself of nuclear. The government, along with the power and appliance industries, must work hard to convince consumers to pay a slightly higher price now for new, energy-saving goods like more-efficient refrigerators, washing machines, computers, and the rest, in order to achieve 40 percent domestic energy (and cost) savings in the next 20 to 50 years. Small efficiency improvements in household appliances alone could save up to 2,000 megawatts per year nationwide, says the Wuppertal Institute — an amount equivalent to the annual output of two large nuclear plants.

All Aboard

It’s going to take more than Germany to raise the market roof on renewable technologies. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that global emissions need to be cut 70 percent just to keep the climate stable. Which is the kind of argument that makes President Bush’s stance at the recent G8 summit in Scotland all the more reviling: how long can the United States remain a consumer of one-quarter of the world’s energy and responsible for one-quarter of its CO2 output while continuing to deny that addressing climate change requires drastic and immediate energy-policy shifts?

Don’t ask Germans (or other Europeans, for that matter) to comment on America’s energy position. They’re fed up, for a lot of good reasons. But whether the U.S. changes course or not, leaders like Jürgen Tritten, Germany’s environment minister, are holding to a pledge that if the European Union adopts 30 percent cuts in carbon emissions by 2020, Germany will adopt 40 percent cuts. (Current E.U. targets of 15 to 30 percent cuts for that period have not yet been written into law.) And while the binding Kyoto agreement requires countries to cut emissions by 8 percent from 1990 levels by 2012, Germany has already cut its levels by 19 percent. Call it Green one-upmanship; the goal, says Tritten, is to continue “making Germany the world leader in alternative energy and in taking action against global warming.”

If the Christian Democratic Union, led by a scowling, Thatcher-esque Angela Merkel, rides the national mood of discontent over unemployment and policy gridlock to power this autumn, the likelihood is that they will seek not to completely reverse Germany’s nuclear phaseout, but to prolong the lifespan of its remaining reactors. What is certain to Lutz Metz, an energy-policy professor at Berlin’s Freie University, is that the CDU will bring “very naive policies” to the table. “The Christian Democrats want the security of power plants to define the length of their running time,” Metz says. “That means more security checks of existing plants, rather than changing the structure and phasing out plant use entirely.” By convincing Germans that their remaining atomic plants operate under safe conditions, conservatives may try to keep the nuclear industry in business as long as possible — if not preventing, then at least delaying, its demise.

But as fuel prices continue to rise, in a sense it doesn’t much matter which political party takes office in September, because Germany’s development of renewables will become an economic, not just an environmental, priority. To come back to Hennicke of the Wuppertal Institute: “A big electricity producer is not interested in the source of his electricity. He is interested in the source of his profit. Whether it comes from nuclear or wind or coal doesn’t matter, as long as the profit rate is high enough.”

And that is the secret behind Germany’s energy revolution: free-market thinking holds it all together. With the government requiring consumers to pay more for clean energy that will save them money in the long run, the renewables industry got the bump it needed. Unlike in the U.S., where scientists, economists, environmental pundits, and even an occasional brave politician have been talking about the renewables revolution for years without making much progress, in Germany that transition is visibly, and heatedly, under way.

No matter what happens in the next election, the Greens have made good use of their seven years in office alongside the Social Democratic Party. Already, China has adopted elements of the Renewable Energy Sources Act to fit its own power-scheme model. In November, an international renewables conference in Beijing will explore strategies that China and other developing countries might use to accelerate into an alternative-energy future. The world’s “developed” countries would do well to take note.

Gasp! by Joe Sherman,
Shoemaker & Hoard,
417 pgs., 2004.

Oxygen may not strike you as a likely protagonist for a book. It’s invisible, it’s all around you, it’s something you inhale 19,000 times a day and take utterly for granted. But Joe Sherman’s Gasp! The Swift and Terrible Beauty of Air is a masterfully inventive biography of air, weaving together geology and history, myth and science, to deepen our understanding and appreciation of life’s most precious gas.

“Understanding air, which is both big and amorphous, and small and right in front of you, demands a few mental oscillations,” Sherman writes. One place to start is in the realm of myth, where stories about the sky are as old as civilization. From India to Egypt, from the Vikings to the Amazonian natives, early human societies forged legends about the invisible gas that surrounded and sustained them. Gods of the sky, like the Greek god Zeus and the Norse god Thor, were frequently violent, short-tempered characters whose actions mirrored the air’s extremes with “torrential storms, raging winds, fire-spewing lightning bolts with blasts of thunder.”

In the modern world, however, “the intensity our forebears felt as they stared upward in a state of wonder at the sky” has been largely lost. Sherman wants to remind us that air does not belong exclusively to the realm of science, that “the sky is a place and it has been since time immemorial.” It is with hope for humanity’s renewal of a more primitive, mystical connection with the sky that he writes, “Myth came before science and will outlast it.”

Sherman devotes a significant portion of his book to the fascinating and obscure history of air science, starting with the Ionian philosophers of ancient Greece. The great minds of the time all had something to say about air: Anaximenes and Heraclitus insisted it was fundamental to the chaotic, chemical mixture of the planet; Plato called the ether beyond air the “nurse of generation” from which sprang fire, earth, and water; Aristotle posited a theory of air as “exhalations” rising out of the earth. When trapped underground, he wrote, these exhalations created metals like copper, gold, and iron; released into the atmosphere, they became the very air we breathed.

Through short, compelling biographies, Sherman brings to life the philosophers, chemists, biologists, and inventors — many of them largely forgotten, despite their genius — who advanced air science through the ages. One is the wandering 16th century homeopathic doctor Paracelsus, who enraged the Catholic Church and Europe’s medical establishment by claiming that certain sicknesses (among mountain miners, for example) resulted from foreign particles traveling through the air and entering the body. Though recognized today as one of the founders of modern medicine, Paracelsus, like many scientists in pre-Enlightenment Europe, threatened the Church’s notion of an earth-centered universe created by God. By analyzing the makeup of the air (and at the same time mocking popular treatments like bloodletting with leeches and urine inspection — “All they do is gaze at piss,” he said), Paracelsus crossed a forbidden line, one we might credit as a proto-environmentalist understanding of the “natural magic” that is our atmosphere.

Sherman describes other, more familiar characters as well, such as the Renaissance-era Robert Boyle, “an upper-crust, God-fearing Englishman, the first scientist to experiment extensively with air,” and his partner Robert Hooke, who together measured air’s ability to compress and expand, showing that the volume of a gas varies inversely with pressure — a theory that became known as Boyle’s law. While Boyle left behind dense and numerous writings about air, Sherman praises Hooke’s single published work, Micrographia, which, as “a veritable bouquet of scientific insight and observation from a shriveled, odd little genius, remains a genuine masterpiece.”

Later, eccentric British chemists like Thomas Hales and John Mayow tinkered at odd experiments (such as wearing masks cluttered with valves and tubes to see how long one could inhale one’s own breath before passing out) and proposed equally odd theories (such as the notion that respiration brought fine nitrous particles into the body, which then fermented in the blood and “fired” the heart). In 1700, George Stahl invented a wacky theory about a substance he called phlogiston, which he said was contained in materials like wood and set free through combustion. Flames, Stahl said, were the visible signs of the invisible phlogiston at work — a notion “so persuasive that it stalled advances on other theories of combustion and respiration for most of the century.” Later in the 1700s, John Dalton built barometers, rain gauges, and thermometers, and pushed atomic theory one significant step forward by discovering the law of partial pressures, which states that the atoms of mixed gases distribute themselves evenly among one another.

There’s something in the air …

The French also contributed to atmospheric science, especially in challenging the restrictive barriers of the Church. Notably, the philosopher Blaise Pascal spent his early years lugging a mercury barometer up and down stairs and finally to a mountaintop, where he proved that the weight of air decreased with altitude. “Making the assumption that air would continue to weigh less and less the higher one went, Pascal decided that eventually air must not weigh anything at all,” Sherman writes. “If air became weightless, it must become nothing. And nothingness was a vacuum. It was the void. At issue, of course, were not the properties of air but the authority of the Church. At issue was atheism.” The idea that the air and the sky stopped existing entirely — that if humans could look high enough they would see nothing overhead, neither light nor oxygen nor even God — went against the belief in a divine cosmos created for humans. (In Pascal’s philosophic view, God may have indeed created the earth and the heavens, but he’d abandoned his creation and left it to humanity to figure out.)

It wasn’t only theological risks that scientists took in positing an “end to the atmosphere.” The French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, credited with discovering oxygen, was beheaded during the Reign of Terror. In the 19th century, other chemists braved that “mainstay of atmospheric research,” hot-air balloon flights. In 1862, Henry Coxwell and James Glaisher ascended 35,000 feet into the stratosphere, where they fought off cold, unconsciousness, and a new thing called altitude sickness, all of which made the task of recording air samples a whole lot more rugged. The air chemists became not “explorers of the seas, like Sir Francis Drake, or of the stars, like Johannes Kepler, but of the invisible.”

Hold Your Breath

Alongside the story of air science, Sherman weaves the evolutionary history of air itself. In doing so, he demonstrates a talent for explaining big ideas in simple, lay terms, from the Big Bang and the formation of oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere to the Cambrian explosion a half billion years ago, when vegetation boosted oxygen to the levels it remains at today and enabled life to flourish on land. He not only makes air exciting to read about but also conveys the great and unlikely fortune that brought evolution to our doorstep, allowing us to live and breathe the way we do.

Sherman wants humans to appreciate that fortune before it’s too late, and so he dedicates the third and final section of Gasp! — which he subtitles “Hold Your Breath” — to a harrowing review of air pollution as it started in England during the industrial era and continued through the last 100 or so years in the United States. One early form of pollution came from warfare: the mustard and poison gases that were introduced in World War I, and the biological and nuclear weapons testing that followed. But the most devastating impact came from industry emissions and, as anyone who reads this magazine will know, from that most beloved member of the American family: the automobile.

As a former resident of Los Angeles and author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated book about General Motors, In the Rings of Saturn, Sherman makes no effort to disguise his disdain for car culture and its adverse effects on the environment. Between 1920 and 1950, smog replaced smoke as the country’s main air concern. On July 26, 1943, a day when no one could see farther than three city blocks in Los Angeles, smog was officially recognized as a problem in that city. Later, the “autopsies of people who had breathed L.A.’s air for decades revealed rib-like bands of soot wrapping once-pink lungs, with black splotches of carbon here and there.” But that didn’t stop the country from paving 43,000 miles of highway over the next 50 years, Sherman notes.

The first federal effort to protect the air was the 1963 Clean Air Act, signed into law by John F. Kennedy. Lyndon Johnson’s Federal Air Quality Act followed four years later, encouraging more auto emissions standards. The most substantial developments, however, happened under the Nixon administration, with the establishment in 1970 of the Air Pollution Control Office, a branch in the newly created Environmental Protection Agency.

Still, by the late 1980s, more than 300 urban and rural areas still failed to meet federal clean-air standards for ozone alone. Terms like smog, acid rain, hazardous chemicals, and radioactive waste became political buzzwords, and environmental concern in Congress grew strong enough to stop Ronald Reagan from dismantling the Clean Air Act. Now, with President Bush entering a second term in office, it’s fair to expect that, in regards to pollution, the sky will, in fact, not be the limit.

That should have all of us worried, but recently, our fears about air have mostly been fears about things that are airborne: anthrax, SARS, hijacked airplanes. As Sherman makes ominously clear, “The new era of terrorism, with its heightened focus on the particular event, could be put into sound bites, easily grasped, and disseminated as news while the general and pervasive air pollutants got pushed aside.” Half a million people still die each year from air pollution worldwide, yet thanks to the Bush war hawks and an obedient media, “air terrors now threatened to obscure the real health culprits of the sky.”

And yet Sherman sees room for hope, in the individual and collective conscience. If he has a message for his readers, it is that each of us must be responsible for our own breath, the personal air that we take in and give out to the world. We must study it, free it, and recognize it as the essence of all living beings, a heritage of shared molecules that goes back to the Big Bang. We must, as he puts it, “pay a little more attention to the daily 19,000, I often tell myself. Appreciate the air, this mystical and scientific elixir, whatever its condition.”