Because current events are still making me lose my mind, I googled and then read an article reassuring me that the carbonization of the Amazon Rainforest won’t lead to the collapse of the global oxygen supply. Mind you, this isn’t because the Amazon won’t be carbonized; it will, it’s just that no particular forest has much of a net impact on global oxygen levels one way or the other. That’s because forest ecosystems decompose as much as they grow, and so absorb about as much oxygen as they produce: in terms of the composition of our atmosphere, the Amazon is a wash. What matters is the rate of burial of organic carbon from plants in places where it’s cut off from oxygen and can’t decompose. The Amazon makes a big contribution to that by sending wood down its namesake river and out to sea, but annual rates of addition are so small compared to the overall amount of oxygen in our atmosphere that we won’t notice the change for millennia.
The atmosphere is, however, changing. Increasing carbon dioxide concentrations make the air harder to breathe and will, given time, make us stupider; even at the 400 ppm level, which we’ve now shot past, carbon dioxide demonstrably slows down human problem solving. It also makes things hotter, of course, changing the physical properties of the atmosphere so that, for instance, aircraft have a hard time taking off and (on a smaller scale) people have a hard time dissipating excess heat. Ever-lengthening fire seasons blot out the sun over major cities for days or weeks at a time.
So much modern technology – from air conditioning to the Haber-Bosch Process to chemical warfare – takes the atmosphere for granted, as a resource or as a dumping ground or just as a breathable default that will always be big enough to dissipate whatever we put in it. The atmosphere has been so kind to us that we’ve even evolved to ignore it, our strongest senses – sight, hearing, touch – basically treating the atmosphere as if it weren’t there. The atmosphere is so necessary for us that lack of it sends the body into immediate, death-avoiding panic. Yet, now that the atmosphere is being methodically destroyed, there’s no sense of general worry to mirror that reflex response.
What if the global supply of oxygen really were about to collapse? Could we do anything about it? Would we want to? Or would we “adapt,” carrying oxygen tanks with us everywhere like emphysema patients – oxygen tanks we’d be paying for, probably further enriching the same tycoons who made bank off of burning down the Amazon in the first place? Would rich people live in hermetically-sealed dwellings with central O2? Would we mind the death of the outdoors, or would we secretly be thrilled that nobody could tell us to go play outside anymore? Would the market for drones take off?
It’s easier for me to imagine our putting up with this complete involution of nature than it is for me to conceive of action being taken, on any timescale, to protect the atmosphere. That’s a consequence of where politics are right now: thirty years ago, the whole world got together to ban CFCs, but now – despite their well-established ozone-destroying effects – CFCs are somehow having a comeback. Politics used to be at bottom about survival; now it’s another profit stream for the rich, with all the dangerous knock-on effects that implies.