Breathing – absorbing oxygen, releasing carbon dioxide – can be dangerous, for some more than others. In Australia, the ‘unprecedented’ Black Summer bushfires in southeastern Australia in late 2019 and early 2020 burned up to 24 to 40 million hectares across multiple states and territories (Commonwealth of Australia 2020a: 1.12, 1.14). Smoke infiltrated borders of the skin, of fur, of steel and brick and mortar, killing nearly 3 billion vertebrates by incineration, asphyxiation and starvation (World Wildlife Fund 2020). The fires were the direct cause of thirty-three human deaths; their respiratory effects contributed to over 400 other human deaths (Borchers Arriagada et al. 2020). Blanche Verlie (2022a) writes about these fires: ‘In breathing the smoke, we inhaled incinerated ecosystems, and the tiny particles of charred multispecies bodies made their way into our lungs, our blood, our organs, our brains’ (297). These fires, and their effects on breath, fuelled further mass climate justice activism that had already been happening in Australia and across the world.

Before climate justice activism amidst the Black Summer fires in Australia, there had already been other protests against climate inaction in the midst of poor air quality and pollution, and other protests met with respiratory assault; asphyxiation and suffocation were no new phenomena. In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a protester at the September 2019 global strike for climate held a cardboard placard declaring, ‘We can't breathe money’ (Tee 2019). On the same day, in Delhi, India, a young protester said:

Aman Sharma's eloquent words reverberated later, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when philosopher Achille Mbembe (2020) proposed a ‘universal right to breathe’ for ‘all life’, including and exceeding humans (61–2).