As oxygen from the environment combines with the sugars in patats, it gets respired from the roots as carbon dioxide and water.

Tiny pores on a leaf’s underside are arranged to take in carbon dioxide and respire water, allowing the plant to transform sunlight into energy.

That carbon feeds hordes of bacteria and fungi, which build some of it into more microbes while respiring the rest into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

Such assurance marked “Rainphase,” a 2015 essay by New’s countrywoman Salina Fisher, evoking the wet weather of Wellington, with slow-shifting orchestral hues interspersed with plucked, tapped precipitation and scraped and respired gusts of wind.

“So our biosphere in the North is leakier than we thought because soils are remaining warm and respiring both carbon dioxide and methane.”