Air Conditioning and Breathing

I grew up from infancy to nearly eighteen without enjoying the luxury of air conditioning in my home. This is notable, especially since my home was in hot, sunny South Florida! And the first three years of my elementary school education were spent in classrooms with windows that were usually wide open to the outside. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t until I was almost nine that I ever spent any appreciable amount of time in air conditioning. But this deprivation didn’t seem to have any detrimental effect on me. Since then, though, I’ve developed some allergies, and I wonder if this doesn’t correlate to an extent with the fact that I spend a great percentage of my life in air-conditioned buildings. Breathing the outside air is different from breathing recycled, closed-in air with its mold and fungal spores. Cumulatively, this has to have an effect on people. I’ve known people who, later in their lives, have developed respiratory problems such as allergies and asthma. Part of their coping strategies usually involved confining themselves to an air-conditioned environment, away from what they would consider to be harmful airborne substances. But could it possibly be that, in continually breathing old moldy air that this may be one of the contributing factors in their afflictions?

Being interested in this, I did a little research on the Internet and only found articles pointing to air conditioning as a positive environment for those already suffering from respiratory afflictions. Of course, the systems had to be kept clean to avoid fungal buildup. But I still wonder whether prolonged exposure to this artificial environment somehow weakens the body to the point where it cannot handle the natural outside air anymore, but must instead exist in a more controlled respiratory environment.

I remember reading a long time ago a short science fiction story from 1953 titled Crucifixus Etiam by Walter M. Miller, Jr. It was written long before we really knew anything about the Martian atmosphere. The story centered on the hard physical labor that workers (in the future, of course) performed on Mars, with its imagined thin, difficult-to-breathe atmosphere. The problem of breathing had been dealt with by supplying the workers with special machines that they could put on that sent the needed oxygen directly into their system without them have use their lungs. They could then work in comfort, but their bodies became so accustomed to not actively breathing that their lungs atrophied from disuse to the point where they would be forced to use these machines for the rest of their lives. Although this is not an exact analogy, this story does express a concern I have.

If we, as a people, keep insisting on controlling our environment to shut out all the “bad” things (such as pollutants and pollen) out there, then instead of these things causing some minor discomfort when breathed, the body will, over time, become unable to withstand them and eventually, exposure to them can precipitate a crisis, such as an asthmatic attack or an allergic reaction. In other words, someone may create their own ideal environment, only to eventually discover that they have created their own prison.

I can’t really say, in individual cases of people who developed respiratory trouble, that this applies to them. There are many other factors that determine these sorts of ailments, such as genetic and developmental factors, as well as exposure to poisons found in substances such as tobacco products, asbestos, or coal. But I can look at my own life and reflect upon the fact that my allergies seem to correlate well with my increased exposure to air conditioning and concomitant decreased exposure to outdoor air.