Comment by shellfishgene 2 days ago
"A forest is a pristine environment..." Hmm, is that really so? The forest air is also full of pollen, fungal spores, viruses and bacteria, all kinds of volatile organic molecules and so on. The terpenes mentioned as problematic come from conifers after all.
I'm pretty allergic to all those things so I'm going to disagree with your implied preference and take the haribo and brake pad dust all day.
There weren't many North American conifers on the African savannah when humans were evolving, and our ancestors' reproductive success was not generally affected by air quality. We haven't evolved immunity to things like volcanic gasses which have been around forever. Many plants deliberately evolved to produce toxins. A few of these we find delicious specifically because we did not co-evolve with those plants. Natural = safe is a bad heuristic.
Not just conifers. In Los Angeles, liquidambar trees are planted all over for autumn color, and it turns out that they’re an enormous contributor to smog formation.