The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City by Alexis Madrigal. Picador, 384 pp., $32.
The air is imperceptible until it isn’t. At times it is unfathomably diffuse—a “vast machine,” as the historian of science Paul Edwards memorably put it, of chemical compositions and particulate matter, circulatory systems moving and settling on a planetary scale. At other times it reveals itself in a dramatic display of exception, from the “plague-cloud” of industrial belch that John Ruskin diagnosed in 1880s London to the increasingly ubiquitous wildfire smoke turning our cities sepia. Usually, the fumes of day-to-day traffic are harder to bring into focus. In 2023, I took a group from the California College of the Arts to visit the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP), a community-led environmental justice organization that (among other things) produces participatory research and action plans on local atmospheric pollution. On this day, the irony that we had a charter bus idling outside of an…