Beyond Touch: Cultivating Caring Atmospheres in Arid America

All across the arid and semi‐arid lands of the American Southwest, people are grappling with the transgressive movements and toxic possibilities of particulate matter pollution. Based on an ethnography of environmental injustice and everyday life in rural Eastern California, this article examines the practical acts of positive air‐conditioning through which patients, parents, and carers respond to the onset of dust‐aggravated respiratory illness; an effect of the particulate matter first unleashed by the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in the early twentieth century and now compounded by the state's “historic” drought. While some seek to cultivate the breathability of domestic spaces, others try to hold the City of Los Angeles accountable for the disastrous social and material effects of its actions. Playing close attention to these varied practices of space‐making reveals the uneven geographies of risk and responsibility associated with the abrasive atmospheres of late industrialism, as well as shining fresh light on the mediation of atmospheric care in times of anthropogenic environmental crisis.