Sunday, December 27, 2009

86. Breathable Air

(oxygen tanks, proper percentages of breathable air, house plants--see below for which ones)

The Current Air Regime: Composition of dry atmosphere, by volume, ppmv (parts per million by volume)

Gas Volume

Nitrogen (N2)780,840 ppmv (78.084%)
Oxygen (O2) 209,460 ppmv (20.946%)
Argon (Ar) 9,340 ppmv (0.9340%)
Carbon dioxide(CO2)383 ppmv(0.0383%)
Neon (Ne) 18.18 ppmv (0.001818%)
Helium(He) 5.24 ppmv (0.000524%)
Methane(CH4) 1.745 ppmv (0.0001745%)
Krypton(Kr) 1.14 ppmv (0.000114%)
Hydrogen(H2) 0.55 ppmv (0.000055%)

Not included in above dry atmosphere:

Water vapor (H2O) ~0.40% over full atmosphere, typically 1% to 4% near surface

Minor components of air not listed above include:

Gas Volume

nitrous oxide 0.3 ppmv (0.00003%)
xenon 0.09 ppmv (9x10-6%)
ozone 0.0 to 0.07 ppmv (0%-7x10-6%)
nitrogen dioxide 0.02 ppmv (2x10-6%)
iodine 0.01 ppmv (1x10-6%)
carbon monoxide trace
ammonia trace

Many of these smaller toxics may be at higher concentrations in areas because many are a product of the world's badly organized cities. So protect yourselves with the below ideas to get breathable air in your homes and offices while returning to an economy that grows the world's forests instead of destroys them.

How easy it is to neglect what is all around us and required with every breath.

The fish definitely forgets it lives in a world of water for it to appear this late in the list. Perhaps it's an appropriate near cap to the list to ponder how we wrap ourselves and the commodity ecology in the gaseous chemical effect from ecological relations, unconsciously everyday.

We breathe a network of the whole commodity ecology, the air.

we drink in a network of the whole commodity ecology with water.

We raise our food in a network of the whole commodity ecology in the way the soil is treated in human agriculture and industry, etc. (huge demineralization over the past century in industrialized agriculture is slowly raising systemic disease levels; though there are solutions that are known and posted under the 'soil/dirt' category, read there).

KEEP IN MIND that all 'services' of oxygen production are dependent upon the 'accidental' history of the ecology in which we have come to be dependent.

Oxygen is 'not natural.'

Oxygen is a biological product of the history of the larger ecology as a whole.

Clean oxygen upon which we depend for our every breath really is a 'biological pollutant'. Developed as 'industrial waste' by early chlorophyll-based life on the planet (for green plants were industrious in expanding all over the face of the planet), this oxygen 'waste' is instrumental currently of our healthy ecology because of all the other creatures that depend on this 'biological waste', oxygen. Ecology itself historically developed like ecological modernization--taking wastes into itself and associating 'cradle to cradle' forms of production instead of letting oxygen wastes be unintegrated in life.

Oxygen-based life production then became another whole level of life as it became a durable infrastructure making up 20% of the atmosphere. (It was a pollutant because it killed off a lot of early bacteria that hated oxygen, which receded into the depths of the earth or deep underwater, or as most people know it, through forms of food poisoning from anaerobic bacteria that only grow in the lack of oxygen.)

Oxygen waste became so stable, that reptiles and mammals started to take advantage of the free oxygen service. These forms of life flowed from the seas (with its dissolved oxygen in the water), then this mobile life went into the land later.

Oxygen wastes from plants still flows into all of us, and oxygen is the chemical which we are the most dependent upon as mammals I would argue.

Moreover, mess up the durable percentages (i.e., more CO2 (carbon dioxide), CO (carbon monoxide), or more ozone (O3), or less oxygen) and we die or our health is impaired. Ask the canary in the coalmine. Ask the emphysema patient.


1. To help your home or office air:

a.

Kamal Meattle on how to grow fresh air
4:07 min




b.

15 House Plants You Can Use As Air Purifiers
Feb 18 2010

Here are 15 plants that could clean your air for just the price of a few drops of water each day. First lets check some of the evidence behind the claim that plants can purify your household air:

b1. NASA Research

A NASA research document came to the conclusion that “house plants can purify and rejuvenate air within our houses and workplaces, safeguarding us all from any side effects connected with prevalent toxins such as formaldehyde, ammonia and also benzene.”

Here are the results of the NASA research study:

Common name.....Scientific name.................................Score
1 Areca palm......Chrysalidocarpus lutescens......................8.5
2 Lady palm.......Rhapis excelsa......................................8.5
3 Bamboo palm.....Chamaedorea seifrizii...........................8.4
4 Rubber plant....Ficus robusta.......................................8.0
5 Dracaena “Janet Craig”....Dracaena deremensis “Janet Craig”.....7.8
6 English ivy.....Hedera helix....................................7.8
7 Dwarf date palm.Phoenix roebelinii..............................7.8
8 Ficus Alii......Ficus macleilandii “Alii”...........................7.7
9 Boston fern.....Nephrolepis exalta “Bostoniensis”...............7.5
10 Peace lily......Spathiphyllum sp. ..................................7.5

[rest here and here]

Other research at the weblink above.

2. The Forests

For a larger remediation than your personal home, bring back the lungs of the planet, the forests:

Willie Smits restores a rainforest
20:39 min




Everything is possible.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I really liked the article, and the very cool blog