Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Voice Upholt is a writer and journalist and the recipient of the 2019 Award for Investigative Journalism

from the James Beard Foundation.

As a chemical plant in St. James Parish, Louisiana, threatens a majority black community

with toxic emissions, Boyce looks deeply at the nature of air, from natural history to the textural intimacy of breath,

and considers how it can challenge the often white ideal of the wild as a place of escape.

Wild air, world mothering air, nestling me everywhere.

From Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, the Blessed Version compared to the air we breathe.

Unable to breathe, though we were, we blew.

From Nathaniel Mackie's poem, The Overghost Orchestra's Next.

1. A Natural History.

First, a chemical breakdown.

The air you breathe consists almost entirely of nitrogen and oxygen,

78% and 21%, respectively, by volume. The third most common material is argon, a colorless and odorless and notably inert gas that makes up most of the remaining 1%.

These numbers leave out water vapor, which evaporating and then condensing remains always in flux

at the specific concentration variable from place to place across the planet, but reaching

sometimes as high as 4%. Then there's a spattering of other rarerer materials, xenon and helium and

hydrogen and methane, and of course carbon dioxide, which has always been there and today makes

up less than 1% of 1% of the air, far less than in previous eons, though far more than we may be able to stand.

It is easy to call this the atmosphere, but to truly appreciate this collection of gases,

...