Henry Abbott

How accurate is the 2012 animated movie musical interpretation of “The Lorax”? For those who haven’t seen the film, the main character lives in a town where, absent any real plants, buying bottles of air from a company called O’Hare Air is the only source of “fresh” oxygen. The concept of selling air, or oxygen, sounds outlandish and dystopian. Breathable oxygen appears inherent, like something that’s been around forever. Moreover, it seems unsellable because air is simply what we exist in, making it look and feel like, in essence, nothing. So, how can you sell nothing, and how can something as ever-present as oxygen in the air ever go away?

Well, breathable oxygen actually hasn’t always been around. Earth coalesced some 4.5 billion years ago, but it wasn’t until photosynthetic microbes called cyanobacteria emerged and began releasing oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis that oxygen finally accumulated in the atmosphere around 2.4 billion years ago. Eventually, a small alga absorbed one of these photosynthetic microbes and evolved into hundreds of thousands of photosynthetic species of plants, mosses, liverworts, algae and hornworts.

Plants transform the Earth’s carbon dioxide into oxygen, something that our bodies understand how to use and our cells need to function. They translate Earth into somewhere that we and millions of other animal species can live. We reciprocate, using the oxygen they provide to reproduce the carbon dioxide they need to photosynthesize. Through this global cooperative cyclical tradeoff, we—plants and animals—keep each other alive.

So, don’t take oxygen for granted. Reconsider its “inherent” presence. There is no breathable oxygen on the moon, mars, neptune, passing asteroids or the space between the planets or within the sun. Think about all the places we can’t breathe, and be grateful for the trees.

If you think we could never actually sell air, or that no one would ever buy it, think again. Water is to a fish as air is to us. Air and water are the seemingly uniform and static collection of molecules within which we exist. They are everywhere, so our eyes have evolved to see past them, to perceive them as nothing. On the molecular level, they are just like us, a unique collection of molecules. The air we breathe on the ground is different from the air escaping thermal vents on the ocean floor, the air in your stomach or the air way up in the atmosphere.

Earth’s freshwater, as essential to life as atmospheric oxygen and more than a billion years older, is bottled and sold. This freshwater, plentiful and consumable, has sustained terrestrial life for hundreds of millions of years and humans for over 300,000. Nowadays, we buy bottled water because it is “clean”. Bottled water’s cleanliness is unique, because we can’t always trust that the water from the faucet, the river or the well isn’t polluted. We pollute Earth’s water with plastics, fecal and radioactive wastes, bacterias, parasites, viruses, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers and pesticides, nitrates, phosphates and more. These pollutants hitchhike the water as it moves across the globe through lakes, rivers, oceans, animals, clouds, plants, rains and into the ground. Access to non-toxic water, a fundamental aspect of all life, has become a privilege we must pay for, whether we are buying a bottle, a Brita or installing a filter in our pipes.

We also buy bottled water because we don’t have access to freshwater everywhere. This makes it inherently different from the breathable oxygen that we assume surrounds us wherever we go. Well, does it? What happens when we go somewhere without enough breathable oxygen to keep us alive? We buy it! Maybe you’ve thought of this by now, but it is already quite customary to buy air. We already buy oxygen tanks to breathe at the top of mountains where the breathable atmospheric oxygen is sparse and underwater where oxygen only exists bound to hydrogen. Luckily, these are rare exceptions. We have plenty of access to oxygen rich clean air where we live most of our lives.

Now, what happens when we can no longer trust the safety of the air around us? Access to clean air, just as with access to clean water, is quickly becoming a privilege. Various industries and activities such as burning of fossil fuels, vehicle emissions, agricultural burning, mining and garbage burning contribute to air pollution around the world. Air quality reaches dangerous levels in regions with high population density, where some of these harmful activities are more common. When we find ourselves in areas of poor air quality, be it while traveling or during the 2023 Canadian wildfires, we are now advised to wear face masks to filter pollutants from the air, just like we are accustomed to installing water filters and purifiers to clean our water. As air quality worsens and becomes increasingly dangerous, we will trust the safety of our air less. This will force us to innovate, and then pay for, more ways to breathe “clean” unpolluted air.

Worse than poisonous air, we threaten to make the air unbreathable altogether. We eradicate plants from entire regions through pollution and practices like deforestation, land-use change and agriculture. The more plants we kill, the more we thwart the beautifully balanced global exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide that is essential to life for all multicellular organisms, be it a California redwood, morel mushroom, monarch butterfly, red panda or human being.

The more plants we kill, the closer we come to making “The Lorax” a reality. The air’s concentration of usable oxygen shrinks as we extinguish our translators. Our eyes don’t notice this change, but our lungs do, and breathing on the ground will feel like trying to breathe in space if we don’t stop. The closer we get to this point, the more valuable breathable air will become. Eventually, bottles of air could be the only way for us, or any organism, to breathe, just as the Lorax foretold.