Air: Nature and Culture by Peter Adey (review)

On 2 April 1935, Hugh Hammond Bennett, director of the newly created United States Soil Erosion Service, testified before Congress about the importance of passing the Soil Conservation Act. At the time, the United States was suffering the effects of the Dust Bowl, which blasted the dry and depleted soil of the West across the nation in ferocious storms that buried farms, prompted mass migration, and resulted in countless efforts to understand, represent, and manage it. To illustrate the critical need for the legislation, Bennett interrupted his testimony to ask legislators to look outside. There, they saw an enormous black cloud descending on the capitol from the exhausted farms of Texas and Oklahoma. The legislation passed. State management and subsidies resulted in improved farming practices, and, with some assistance from wetter weather, the Dust Bowl gradually came to and end.

I mention this moment in US history because the confluence of air, soil, politics, history, and narrative is the kind of incident examined so adroitly in Peter Adey’s most recent work, Air: Nature and Culture. In his study of the way people have tried to understand, harness, discipline, and deploy the air, Adey also manages to convey a pervading sense of aerial menace—a sense of past and impending disaster. Along with the promise of a bright future “life in the air” (60) comes the threat of an air filled with radioactive particles, air as the realm of machines of destruction and death, air as a warming atmosphere that promises vast disruption of social, economic, and environmental structures.

Like plowing the sea or sweeping the beach, apprehending the air is a traditional metaphor for futility. However, Adey is skilled in multidisciplinary analysis and chooses his subjects carefully. In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of many of the people he studies: he renders air visible, thinkable; he exposes it to the possibility of study. As Adey suggests, air is the site of respiration as well as aspiration: the medium we must inhabit and the repository of hope and dreams. Engaging with Foucauldian bio-politics and recent work in affect theory, Adey displays the air as a cloud of elements, of dynamic forces: of wind and politics, earth and capital, water and history. In other hands, the theoretical eclecticism and sheer breadth of subject might result in a rather unwieldy study. In Adey’s case, however, the approach never feels contrived.

In many ways, Air is a companion piece to Adey’s work Aerial Life: Mobilities, Spaces, Affects (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), which examines the way that control of the air affects the behavior of those subject to such regimes. When control of the skies enables communication, travel, trade, surveillance, and threat, all life becomes aerial. Had Adey not already published a book by that title, it might have served equally well for this present volume because it considers not only the aerial life of humans, who depend on air and are conditioned by it, but also the life of air itself as a concept and as a set of dynamic physical and representational relationships.

At the center of Adey’s study of air is its relation to the human body: the effort to understand the effect of air on life and then to manipulate and deploy the air to good or ill effect. He begins with the breath: the 500 mL tidal volume that the average set of human lungs displaces in a single inspiration or exhalation. For Anaximenes, as Adey notes, the air was a mixture of spirit and matter, “a combination of the pneuma (spirit) and aer (material substance)” (14). However, air is no pure substance. For centuries, part of the difficulty of apprehending air was its “lack of uniformity” (71), and not until the work of Joseph Priestly and Antoine Lavoisier in the eighteenth century did people begin to understand properly that it wasn’t generalized “air” that enabled animal life, but the 21 percent oxygen load each of our breaths...