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

by Martin Mahony (Editor), Samuel Randalls (Editor)

Overview

As global temperatures rise under the forcing hand of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, new questions are being asked of how societies make sense of their weather, of the cultural values, which are afforded to climate, and of how environmental futures are imagined, feared, predicted, and remade. Weather, Climate, and Geographical Imagination contributes to this conversation by bringing together a range of voices from history of science, historical geography, and environmental history, each speaking to a set of questions about the role of space and place in the production, circulation, reception, and application of knowledges about weather and climate. The volume develops the concept of “geographical imagination” to address the intersecting forces of scientific knowledge, cultural politics, bodily experience, and spatial imaginaries, which shape the history of knowledges about climate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822946168
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	03/24/2020
Series:	INTERSECTIONS: Histories of Environment , #28
Edition description:	1
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Martin Mahony is a lecturer in human geography at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. He works on the history of atmospheric science and technology and on the politics of climate change.

Samuel Randalls is an associate professor in geography at University College London. His research explores both contemporary and historical relationships between business, science, and the environment, with a particular focus on weather and climate.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Weather, Climate, and the Geographical Imagination Martin Mahony Samuel Randalls 3

Part I Spaces of Observation

1 Atmospheric Empire

Historical Geographies of Meteorology at the Colonial Observatories Simon Naylor Matthew Goodman 25

2 Imperial Oscillations

Gilbert Walker and the Construction of the Southern Oscillation George Adamson 43

3 The Weather Ship

Networks, Disasters, and Imaginaries after 1945 Katharine Anderson 67

4 Looking for the Leeuwin

An Environmental History of the Leeuwin Current Ruth A. Morgan 93

Part II Horizons of Expectation

5 Imagined Geographies of Climate and Race in Anglophone Life Assurance, C. 1840-1930 James Kneale Samuel Randalls 115

6 The British Women's Emigration Association and Climate(S) of South Africa Georgina Endfield 132

7 Race and Rainmaking in Twentieth-Century Southern Africa Meredith McKittrick 152

8 Weather, Climate, and the Colonial Imagination Meteorology and the End of Empire Martin Mahony 168

Part III Atmospheric Entanglements

9 Darwinian Hippocratics, Eugenic Enticements, and the Biometeorological Body David N. Livingstone 191

10 Civilization, Climate, and Ozone

Ellsworth Huntington's "Big" Views on Biophysics, Biocosmics, and Biocracy James Rodger Fleming 215

11 The Shaded Modernism of the Global Interior

Climate and Risk in the Architecture of MMM Roberto, Rio de Janeiro, 1936-1955 Daniel A. Barber 232

Afterword: Historiographies and Geographies of Climate Mike Hulme 274

Notes 281

Selected Bibliography 327

Contributors 355

Index 359

Editorial Reviews

If we are to truly understand contemporary climate change and its various social constructions and machinations, we must situate it within a reasonable understanding of the historical context of the measurement, study, portrayals, and uses of climate, both social and scientific. Using the concept of the ‘geographical imagination’ and how that imagination helped produce what was or is known as climate knowledge, provides a useful and perhaps vital frame for understanding that context. These fourteen contributors provide concrete examples of climate knowledge creations and imagination, many in support of the project of British Imperialism. An important volume that forces one to reconsider the ways we’ve always thought about climate.”—Randy Peppler, The University of Oklahoma

“This innovative volume offers a fresh way to think about the relationship between climate and society. Working with the methods of historical geography, the authors underscore the uniqueness of the atmosphere and oceans as sites of science, as fields in constant motion that can’t be inhabited for long. Getting one’s bearings under these circumstances has always been both a material and an imaginative challenge. As these richly researched essays demonstrate, the different ways in which the global of the global climate has been imagined have had real-world consequences, constraining how people think and act. These case studies are not only fascinating historical excursions; they also hint at how the geographical imagination might be reshaped in the future to confront the climate crisis.”—Deborah Coen, Yale University

From the Publisher