Air-Borne

This week, a conversation with Carl Zimmer about his new book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe.

Air-Borne is an epidemiological history of how we think about the air and its relationship to disease. For centuries, fear of airborne miasmas impacted the design of buildings and cities. While the underlying science of miasma theory was completely wrong, the focus on ventilation and clean air was actually ahead of its time. In this conversation Roman and Carl talk through one of the book’s central arguments: that we should treat indoor air like we treat tap water—as a shared resource that requires standards, monitoring, and protection. This shift would represent a fundamental reimagining of how we design and inhabit spaces, and how we think about the air we breathe together.

Emmett FitzGerald will be interviewing author and 99PI contributor Sam Bloch in San Francisco next week at the Commonwealth Club on Tuesday, July 29th. They’ll be talking all about Sam’s fantastic new book, Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource.