HOW COME NO ONE’S NERVOUS ABOUT OXYGEN?

Everyone is talking about carbon dioxide.  Well, what about the flipside?  Excuse the high school chemistry, but doesn’t every carbon dioxide molecule (CO₂) formed by burning anything  imply the binding of an oxygen (O₂) molecule to a carbon, and therefore the loss of that oxygen molecule, plus heat?  This means the conversion of an oxygen molecule into something you or I could never breathe (although, indirectly, we could, provided there were enough trees to convert the CO₂ back into O₂—oops, no, wait, we cut those down, didn’t we?).  Instead of a nice, cool, breathable O₂ molecule, we now have a CO₂ molecule joining all its kin above to hold more and more of the produced heat to the breast of Planet Earth....whether you light the gas or not, it’s hard to breathe in an oven.  I’m sorry, but I breathe oxygen, and so does my son, who will, at the going rate, have even less oxygen to breathe than I do.

Scientists have figures, there’s math to be done.  But scientists often get their money from large corporations who have a vested interest in coming up with a certain result.  Put simply, the scientist whose trials show that a specific, about-to-be-launched antidepressant is likely to have its consumers throwing themselves down the atrium of the campus Psych Building, just may not get rehired by the lab that depends on corporate dollars for its very existence.  This is no laughing matter, either, none of this—the guys in the white coats feed their children with that money, dirty or no.  The guy lying in his own pulp at the bottom of the atrium left family behind, and maybe hungry mouths as well.

Numbers, in short, can be manipulated, proof of corruption can be flushed or shredded or waved away with sly lawyers and cunning PR.  Words are all too often the pink frosting on a pan full of moldy turds.  And you and I might be too busy to sort it all out on the fly, so whom do we believe?

Thankfully, there’s common sense, and there’s grade school biology.  Right now, the buzz (of words and saws) is about the Amazon Rain Forest and other relatively pristine ecological (read “oxygen making”) juggernauts that are being crippled and dismembered before the collective eye.  While we worry about our bills, huge tracts of the Amazon are being leveled and converted into desert.  While we worry about the Amazon, the forests of the great Northwest are being used to provide jobs and profits to the weary.  If we happen to concern ourselves with Oregon spruce trees, we may not hear the last trees falling in Africa.  If we turn off our mass media for a minute, or at least cover eyes and ears, we might hear the echo of bygone trees falling all over Europe, where once a monk could walk from Austria to the west coast of Spain without being able to see the sky, and where now you’d be lucky to find one patch of forest that blotted out the blue as you passed. 

Just where did all that freaking oxygen go?  Because my grade school biology tells me that trees convert a lot of CO₂ into our next breath. 

Or, take Southern Illinois, which is right now fairly well carpeted with juvenile forest (and Lyme-disease carrying deer ticks), but which, nevertheless, should sport more topsoil than the couple inches sprayed over thick clay that one finds there.  It was always a mystery to me—again, using grade school biology with its elementary knowledge of composting—why the soil wasn’t thicker.   All those years of leaves falling (millions years’ of trees’ worth) should have left a lot more humus than is evident now.  Finally, in the middle of a hike through this territory, I came across a publication in a restaurant which explained the enigma: when people first settled those hills, they did what they knew how to do (you see, they’d come from Europe, where a view of the sky overhead was once a rare commodity): they cut down all the trees and tried to farm it (one tiny patch of near-virgin forest, Beall Woods, is left in the northeast corner of the Shawnee Forest in Southern Illinois).  Being hill country, two or three feet of topsoil slid into the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.  Ouch.

Now, I may not have a Ph.D. in nature-ology, but I am willing to bet that A) relatively little of the original forest we now call the Shawnee is left and B) that an extensive, mature forest, blessed with a yard deep of rich topsoil built up over ages of leaf mold composting, can much more efficiently supply you and I with our next breath than an pre-adolescent swath of woods with only a few inches of dirt at its disposal.

WE’RE TALKING ABOUT OXYGEN, PEOPLE!

Survivalists will tell you that, if you’re lost or roughing it out in the wild, water is much more important than food.  Most of us (let’s face it—we’re Americans) could live off our fat for a lot longer than we think.  But there’s only one thing more important than water (unless it’s an environment that’s not cooking you or changing you into freezer meat—but I’ll get to that later), and that’s oxygen.  So why the hell is nobody worked up about our VERY most precious resource? 

Here’s a question I have, looking around at my home state of Illinois (“The Prairie State”, home of the very least expanse of intact prairie of any state except for Iowa, “The Tall Corn State”).  Again, I am thinking about oxygen here.  I have had the privilege of walking through prairie here in the city of Champaign, IL.  It doesn’t take long to do so; you can figure the dimensions of this patch of green, tucked behind a billboard downtown, with a construction worker’s tape measure.  But I  notice that nobody ever cuts it down and leaves the ground there an ugly stubble.  Of course, fall and winter temperatures certainly cut down and even cut off any oxygen production going on in this mini-prairie, but a prairie field produces more O₂ than a cornfield even before harvest (since every square inch is covered in plants), and, since its not barren ground, yay much more than corn stubble.    This is all the more true since every effort has been made during the life of the corn field to eliminate everything but corn by way of handy herbicides and the icy touch of  sterilizing liquid nitrogen fertilizers.

The irony is that Champaign was never a prairie.  It was a swamp that supported a stunning profusion of life, if reports are to be believed that once a person could shoot 100 ducks an hour here.  Now it’s got a lot of lawns, a fair amount of trees (for a city), and some songbirds, but it sure doesn’t have 100 ducks an hour.  And I don’t suppose I even have to point out the supreme lushness of an environment that could support that much waterfowl—but it would, of course, be an environment that supported a huge number of water plants (which is what ducks eat), which would in turn create a huge amount of oxygen (which is what we breathe).

So far: a gajillion fewer trees + a gajillion fewer prairie and swamp plants = two-gajillion fewer O₂  factories.  And they didn’t move to China, Taiwan, or Indonesia; they’re gone, and pretty much forgotten.  The reckless belching of CO₂ (burnt O₂) means less oxygen; ditto the mass sawing, tilling, bulldozing and spraying (if not paving) to death of green plants.  WHY IN GOD’S NAME IS NO ONE TALKING ABOUT OXYGEN?!?!?!

Global warming is not just about oxygen depletion nor exponential increases in carbon dioxide.  They keep saying that the CO₂ acts as a blanket that keeps Earth’s heat from radiating out into space.  Now, if you put an early rising iguana (before she’s had a chance to bask and raise his temperature) under a blanket, you’ll only end up keeping her cold, since she has no warmth to trap.  Ditto the Earth.  But every reaction that took O₂ and burned it onto a carbon molecule to make CO₂ also created heat in the bargain....try lying across your engine block after a nice warm drive in July, and you will see what I mean.  Campfires, cars, furnaces and factories all create both heat and the carbon dioxide to trap it in the atmosphere. 

Which is bad enough.  But after the skin grafts have healed from your experiment with the engine block, lie naked on a rooftop at high noon on a sunny summer day.  The iguana might feel quite nice, but you will surely be frying and baking at the same time.  Sidewalks also get quite warm, also bricks, cars as well (inside and out), and you wouldn’t want to make love on a sun-drenched parking lot unless you’re into some very disturbing S & M....Once you have enough burn cream gingerly spread across your back, try the same experiment by lying in some prairie grass, or the floor of the nearest woods under the same weather conditions.  After you’re done scratching, you might notice that it was a hell of a lot cooler to lie down on natural stuff than it is to lie down on man-made stuff.  That’s because rooftops and parking lots convert the sun’s energy to heat (and glare), while trees and other plants convert it to stems, leaves and flowers and beauty and—yes!—cool, clean oxygen.  In the bargain, they swallow up glare and turn it into oxygen and shade.

If you consider just the sheer number of cars in the world, and all the heat they are generating by burning or just sitting there in the sun (this would include, then, cars parked anywhere outdoors; or, if indoors, the roofs of the parking garages they are in work just as well), and then consider all the green plants that they and their roads and lots and garages have replaced, you might just come to the conclusion that, hey, we are creating and trapping quite a bit of heat that never existed until we as a race proudly reached our newsworthy critical mass of population and technology. 

Then, consider the obvious: that the aim of the so-called global economy (I don’t find it very economical, myself.  For that matter, I don’t find the term “conservative” very fitting—they’re not trying to conserve anything but profits) is to increase sales of heat creating/heat trapping stuff indefinitely.  It’s grow or die, and I know I am not the first to point this out but that would a great go-fight-win motto for cancer, or plague. 

Deserts also create heat.  Sand, like asphalt, gets quite hot.  Barren ground, compared to rain forest, creates a lot of heat.  Cut down the rain forests, which miraculously grow up out of poor and scanty soil, and you have barren ground, which can boast of only the banal skill of heating up when hit by sunlight.  Desert.  Again, more heat, less oxygen.  The fires set in the slash-and-burn technique of converting rain forest to arable land (for a year or two) will be a small factor in the heat equation, because the land itself will now create heat whenever touched by the sun, indefinitely. 

So why is nobody talking about heat except in terms of the carbon dioxide that traps it?  As if 99% of our activities weren’t constantly creating more HEAT?  In Spanish, you don’t say “I’m hot”, you say, tengo calor—I have heat.  Here’s what I think: tenemos calor—we have heat.  Tenemos mucho calor.  Oof!

…OK, I have done a bit of research.  Here’s why no one is talking about oxygen, it’s because there is so much of it.  The amount of CO₂ in relation to O₂ right now is .17%.  Oxygen is the second most common component of the Earth’s atmosphere at 23.1% by weight.  CO₂ is less than .06% by weight.  There’s so much freaking oxygen, we NEVER have to worry about it’s running out on us, right?

Where have I heard this before?  There’s so much freaking oil, land, water, forest, glacial ice, blah, blah, blah, whatever might stand in the way of the next contract.  Virtually ALL of the oxygen blessing this planet came from plants, and if the plants go, eventually so will the oxygen.  All I know is, they keep revising the speed at which global warming is increasing—every ten years I hear, “10 years ago, no one thought that global temperatures (or glacial melting, or coral reef die-off) could have progressed to where it has now.”  Meanwhile, oil rigs are set to rise out of the sea off the formerly prohibited coast of California.  Meanwhile, the automakers conspire to sell every man, woman and teenager in China a new car—and everyone there, as well as in every Third World country, wants a new car, would feel left out, deprived, poor and pathetic if they were to not own one.

Oh—shit!

It makes me want to wear a houseplant on my back, with a tube in my nose leading to the plant.  Oxygen!

Author's note: since I have written this speculative article, it has come out that atmospheric oxygen levels are indeed falling (faster, alarmingly, than carbon dioxide levels are rising).  See link:  http://disinfo.com/2013/01/atmospheric-oxygen-levels-are-dropping-faster-than-atmospheric-carbon-levels-are-rising/ Also, there are major hypoxic ocean zones due to blooms of inedible phytoplankton, themselves a consequence of farm runoff and treated sewage.  A healthy marine ecosystem's plants would be creating oxygen for itself and the world, but...