AIR

After giving this assignment some thought and reading the essays, I decided to research something from the natural world that was not referenced in the reading. Something that I encounter every day, but do not see, and consider rarely, is air.

  I mean, it is the thing that keeps us living.  It is everywhere (hopefully).  Without it we wouldn't have the other things, the plants, animals that make up natural history. First of course, I wanted to research the basics. 




What is air made of...

According to most diagrams I have found, air is made up of 78 % nitrogen, 20% oxygen, and 1% a lot of other things, varying from region to region.
From my interest in what air is made of I started to think about air as an artifact, or something to collect, in the same way that people collect rocks, plants, insects, animals.  I am not sure where I first saw someone have a jar of air. In fact, I couldn't find nearly as much as I had hoped on the topic. The few things I did find are as follows.

 

In 2010 the National Trust of Great Britain, decided to give bottled air to overworked city workers, saying that it would help relieve stress.  According to the trust, the jar, which holds 454g of fresh air, should relieve stress for 10 minutes. fresh air for sale. Going into the research I had imagined to find home collections filled with jars of air from different places in the world.  But I was unable to find much proof of this.  In fact most instances of jarred air I have found are politically based or ironic. On the greenpeace website, you can find a jar of hermetically sealed fresh air in their under $100 dollars category.  For just sixty dollars you can own your own jar of fresh air and support the coal plant resistance movement. More Air for Sale