The Future of Climate (extract from 'Weathered') (original) (raw)

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.