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By Root 349 0

a philosophical upside to interconnectedness. We're all shut-ins in this great global ballroom. We are locked in without a key, and there are more and more of us all the time, millions upon millions of us, and we are filling the air with our "smoaks" and our industrial defecations . . . Possibly this sour mood was brought on because I had been thinking about Ivan's recent and apparently malevolent and psychopathic presence in the southern seas, and at the same time had been contemplating the grim matter of air pollution, and had been trying with limited success to sort out fact from propaganda. The evening before I had been dipping into a score of books on the subject, the luminous Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, Donella Meadows' Limits to Growth, Jared Diamond's Collapse, Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress, and a good deal of their gloominess had rubbed off—such a concatenation of woe! so many sins of commission and omission! such a certainty of calamities to come!—and for a moment our planet seemed less like a great global ballroom than it did an enormous ward for the criminally insane, and we the inmates, capering about and setting fires and wondering why the smoke was choking us. The mood didn't last long—my antidote was Richard Fortey's The Earth, a lovely look at the planet from the inside out, but still . . . As I had come to learn, Ivan was a part of the inherent balance of our planet, and in his violent way an inevitable and even positive force. We didn't create Ivan—he just is. But it is possible that through our "smoaks" we are creating the preconditions that make more and more awful Ivans probable. Pollution is not, after all, something we do in a vacuum, with no precedents and no consequences. What we do to the air can and does and will affect wind and weather and climate. This much seems obvious.

And no one seems to be in charge, much. Not in the world, and not in most of the major polluting countries.

The United States is an egregious case in point. Among the better guardians of American ecological purity is the Worldwatch Institute out of Washington, D.C., and among the rational voices that emerge there is that of Ed Ayres, the former editor of the Worldwatch journal. In a piece written in 2004, Ayres pointed out soberly that in the United States at least, no government agency exists to look after air as such. A multiplicity of agencies concern themselves with minute aspects of air—there are people looking at emissions, for example, and yet other people looking at emission controls, but no one looks after the whole. "The Environmental Protection Agency regulates some aspects of auto pollution, but the Department of Transportation regulates others, and the National Institutes of Health still others. You have to distinguish between people who regulate CO , and the people who regulate CO emissions. Smog is a different department than global warming. Fuel efficiency is a different department than tailpipe emissions. Every component of the air had an agency responsible for it. But no one was responsible just for the air."1

Of course, Ayres is describing the classic reductionist thinking of the current state of Western science—the notion that by understanding something on the molecular level you can thereby understand its purpose. As he put it, "modern science's trend towards attempting to explain large phenomena as accumulations of tiny atomic or cellular ones misses the effects of the phenomena as whole systems." That is, we try to understand a tree by minutely examining its capillary and circulation systems and the molecular structure of its leaves, but we seem to have no appreciation for it just as a tree.

The people who study wind are doing better, I think, perhaps because wind is the most obvious part of air, and understanding a storm persuades hardly anyone anymore that we can control it. Atmospheric scientists, on the most theoretical level, have broken through some kind of limiting conceptual barrier: They are indeed delving deeper into the molecules, but have also regained a clear view