Climate and its changes: a cultural appraisal (original) (raw)

Editor's Introduction: The Cultures of Climate

SAGE Major Reference Work: Climates and Cultures, 2015

This SAGE Major Reference Work -- 'Climates and Cultures' -- brings together recent scholarship concerned with the interweaving of two enduring ideas of the human mind: the idea of climate and the idea of culture. These ideas are not just enduring, but also powerful, in part because like any interesting words they both defy easy definition. In this introductory essay I reflect on how the ideas of climate and culture engage with and mutually shape each other. The essay therefore provides a justification for the six-Volume Reference Work, whose contents I also introduce.

Cultural History of Climate Change

Course Outline: Climate change has garnered extraordinary attention in sciences and humanities alike. It has defied traditional disciplinary analyses and challenged conventional problem solving by highlighting socio-environmental conditions characterized by unprecedented levels of risks for which world governments do not have ready or convenient solutions. Using historical and contemporary sources, this course aims to understand recent developments in the context of a larger historical and cultural background in which 'climate' and 'climate change' have played a foundational role in shaping traditional and moderns societies. The course aims to explore climate change as a phenomenon inextricably linked to what societies want, think and do and how such wants, ideas and practices inform the contemporary climatological citizenship. Students will explore the cultural and socio-political histories of climate and climate change during the last two centuries. They will learn how to contextualize past representations of climate and examine human dimensions of climate risks in relation to anthropogenic drivers and policy responses to global warming as it gets hold in the politics of contemporary carbon democracies. The course will examine how climate has been perceived, known and understood by contemporary and past societies; how it became socially and culturally constituted as a hazard (or a resource); what weather and climate have mean to different individuals, groups and institutions, and how these meanings influenced the ways in which people individually and collectively respond to the climate change problem today. Using a multidisciplinary approach, we comprehensively explore the uses of 'climate' from colonialism to racism, from mercantilism to globalism and from climatic determinism to climate engineering. This 8-week lesson plan is intended toward upper-level undergraduates or graduate students. The content and learning outcomes will be relevant to students in human, geographical, political and environmental sciences keen to develop a contextual understanding of climate issues and apply it to their field of academic interest and professional career. Assigned readings and discussion questions are included to provide an understanding of the ideas to be discussed in class.

Climate Change and Society: About the Rediscovery of Climatic Causation.

2010

In the 18th and 19th century western thinkers spend enormous intellectual energy to argue about the climatic determinants of the civilizational peculiarities of entire nations. There was an endless number of writers who ascribe supreme efficacy to climate. Nearly all aspects and processes of human life were tied to climatic causes In the face of climate change this historically discredited doctrine of climatic determinism has experienced a renaissance. Scholarly literature, media coverage and public discourse of climate change tend to portray it as a single, independent phenomenon or set of phenomena that directly causes other events to happen and is therefore thematically and methodically related to historical climatic determinism. This essay argues that this mode of thought builds on problematic assumption of the relationship between climate and society. Drawing on numerous examples it examines the roots and contemporary forms, as well as the theoretical and political presumptions of climatic determinism, paying particular attention to the development of academic geography.

Climates of Change: Perspectives on Past and Future Climate Change and its Impact on Human Societies

Nature and Culture, 2007

Not too long ago, concerns about changing climate were relegated to the realm of academia and the laboratories of meteorologists, oceanographers, and atmospheric scientists. However now the debate has reached not only the open forums of world politics and policy makers, it has trickled down to the household level through popular media such as science fiction novels and Hollywood films. At the risk of making a bad pun, climate change is a hot topic. As we collectively scrutinize changing climate in the modern world, and its projected effect on the societies that exist today, there is a natural curiosity among the informed public about the state of the climate in the past, the magnitude of these current changes vis-à-vis past fluctuations in climate, and how these might have impacted some of the ancient societies that preceded ours. As a result there have been a number of recent books, for the most part written by geographers and climate scientists, that explain the workings of the world climate in a way that is comprehensible to the educated public.

How Do the Cultural Dimensions of Climate Shape Our Understanding of Climate Change?

Climate, 2021

Climatic events express the dynamics of the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere, but are profoundly personal and social in their impacts, representation and comprehension. This paper explores how knowledge of the climate has multiple scales and dimensions that intersect in our experience of the climate. The climate is objective and subjective, scientific and cultural, local and global, and personal and political. These divergent dimensions of the climate frame the philosophical and cultural challenges of a dynamic climate. Drawing on research into the adaptation in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin, this paper outlines the significance of understanding the cultural dimensions of the changing climate. This paper argues for greater recognition of the ways in which cultures co-create the climate and, therefore, that the climate needs to be recognised as a socio-natural hybrid. Given the climate’s hybrid nature, research should aim to integrate our understanding of the social and the natural d...

Historiographies and Geographies of Climate

Weather, Climate and the Geographical Imagination: Placing Atmospheric Knowledges, 2020

In this brief Afterword to Mahony and Randalls' edited book ‘Weather, Climate and the Geographical Imagination’, I offer a perspective on the motivations behind this volume and reflect on the wider public value of the types of historically- and geographically-sensitive climate scholarship contained in the preceding pages. In particular, I make three observations. First, given how pervasive the idea of climate-change has become in the contemporary world, it is important to challenge simplistic and historically emaciated accounts of what we understand climate to be. Second, richer accounts as offered here of the multi-faceted idea of climate are emancipatory for contemporary politics. They challenge the dangerous hegemony of a naturalistic climate science—“every society needs a cohort of intellectuals to check the dominance of a single perspective when its ideological hand becomes too heavy” (Kagan, 2009: 266)—and open up new ways of framing climate-society relations. Third, these case studies illustrate the multiple ways in which the idea of climate is performative; how one comes to know climate, and the account one gives of its changes, is never politically neutral nor without effect on the social ordering of the world.

Weathered: Cultures of Climate (extract)

Weathered: Cultures of Climate opens up the many ways in which the idea of climate is given meaning in different human cultures and how it is used; how climates are historicised, known, changed, lived with, blamed, feared, represented, predicted, governed and, at least putatively, redesigned. These actions performed on or with the idea of climate emerge from the diverse cultural interpretations of humans’ sensory experience of the atmosphere’s restless weather. Weathered develops a case for understanding climate as an enduring, yet malleable, idea which humans use to stabilise cultural relationships with their weather. The discursive phenomenon of climate-change should therefore be understood as a ubiquitous trope through which the material, psychological and cultural agency of climate is exercised in today’s world. In this sense the phenomenon of climate-change is not a decisive break from the past. Neither is it a unique outcome of modernity. Climate-change should rather be seen as the latest stage in the cultural evolution of the idea of climate, an idea which enables humans to live with their weather through a widening and changing range of cultural and material artefacts, practices, rituals and symbols.