Weather: Spaces, Mobilities and Affects

Kaya Barry, Maria Borovnik, Tim Edensor, Kaya Barry, Maria Borovnik, Tim Edensor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367678340
• eBook ISBN: 9781000297324
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Warming & Climate Change

This book delves into the everyday spaces, diverse mobilities and affective potency of weather. It presents cutting-edge research into the multiplicity of weather phenomena and analyses the lived experiences of humans in conjunction with contemporary issues, notably climate change.

The book considers how everyday experiences of weather in the mundane lives of people are linked to broader changes in weather patterns and climate change. Heat, dust, ice, snow, precipitation, sunlight, clouds, tides and fog are states of weather that impact on the ways in which humans become intertwined with landscapes. Our experiences with weather are diverse and ever-changing, and engaging with weather entangles humans with mobilities, materials and landscapes. This book thus explores affective and sensory resonances, drawing upon a variety of theoretical, empirical and creative material to investigate how weather is perceived in different social and cultural contexts. Key themes focus on the mobilities generated by weather, the affective and sensual potency of weather, and the diverse cultural forms and practices that exemplify how weather is historically, geographically and artistically represented.

Offering a social and cultural understanding of weather events, this book contributes to a growing literature on weather across various disciplines, including human geography and cultural geography, and will thus appeal to students and scholars of geography, sociology, humanities, cultural studies and the arts.

1 Introduction

Placing weather

Tim Edensor, Kaya Barry and Maria Borovnik

Introduction

Heat, dust, ice, snow, precipitation, sunlight, clouds, tides, fire, ash, haze, fog, particles, high or low pressure, cyclones – these and other weather conditions alter the ways in which humans are intertwined with the world. As annual global temperature records continue to climb and ‘extreme’ weather makes international headline news, public attention increasingly focuses on the potent effects of weather on our everyday lives and livelihoods. Simultaneously, public debates about the impacts of chemical emissions on changing weather remain unresolved. Yet, although these ‘weather-worlds’ can be disastrous, disrupting lives, they are also productive of everyday experiences in which kinaesthetic, visual and affective resonances continuously emerge. This book foregrounds the everyday spaces, mobilities and affects of weather, while also registering the recent dramatic changes in weather induced by climate change. We have sought to include a range of cultural, historical and postcolonial aspects in exploring weather from a multitude of viewpoints, and by looking at diverse effects on humans, nonhumans, landscapes and materialities across space and time. In this introductory chapter, we explore five key themes that resonate through the chapters in this book: the place-oriented ways in which weather is experienced and conceived; the diverse mobilities of weather and those induced by weather; the relationship between weather and materialities; the affective potency of weather; and the enfolding of weather into cultural representations. We conclude by readdressing the spatial scales at which weather is understood and apprehended.

Knowing weather, knowing place

We live in places that are ceaselessly assailed by weather, whether this is perceived as consistent and predictable or ever-changing. Weather is a condition of our being-in-the-world, an existential accompaniment to living in place. Along with everyday vegetation, the soundscape of birdsong or traffic and music, local ways of moving and talking, the taste and smell of local food, colours and architectural forms and places of gathering, weather constitutes part of a serially encountered realm, saturated with historical resonances, and contributing to a sense of belonging to place. As we inhabit these weather-worlds, we perform everyday habits that respond to regular patterns of rain, cold and heat, often unreflexively managing daily routines that accommodate the conditions through which we move, work and play.

In carrying out everyday tasks and ordinary practices, people habitually sense place and move through it, for the most part, without thinking, while possessing a competence borne of repeated practice. Weather is thus part of a ‘lay geographical knowledge’ (Crouch, 1999) that informs how and when particular practices are carried out. Such individual habitual competencies and routine engagements with familiar space intersect with those of others. Through sharing inhabitation in weather-worlds, a sense of ‘cultural community’ is co-produced by ‘people together tackling the world around them with familiar manoeuvres’ (Frykman and Löfgren, 1996: 10–11), strengthening affective and cognitive links. Accordingly, as Mick Hulme (2017: 27) insists, all such weather knowledge and practice ‘cannot exist separately from the cultures in which it is made or through which it is expressed’. Critically, as Tim Ingold stresses, and is echoed by contributors to this book, weather ‘is not to make external, tactile contact with our surroundings but to mingle with them’ (Ingold, 2007: 19). Weather gets under the skin of our porous bodies: sunlight tans us, rain soaks us and we are enveloped in fog. And the everyday practices that support our bodies shape weather: transport fumes create haze and pollutants, aeroplanes alter wind corridors, and the food we eat involves intensive water and soil use that exacerbates drought and fire conditions. Awareness of weather conditions initiates anticipation, planning and practice.

This ongoing relationship is underpinned by recent research that shows that 94% of Britons admit to having discussed weather in the past six hours (Maloney, 2017: ix), commenting on the qualities that persist at any time and shape their activities. This everyday weather talk is thoroughly embedded in English language phrases: ‘I feel a bit under the weather’; ‘it was storm in a teacup’; ‘she stole my thunder’; ‘he was a fair weather friend’, ‘I put the wind up him’ and ‘I’ll take a rain check’. And besides being grounded in everyday conversations, weather-oriented habits become institutionalized through scheduled weather forecasts – television and radio bulletins organized hourly, daily and weekly that foretell of coming conditions via established visual and narrative media forms. Weather data is accessed over 9.5 billion times each day (AccuWeather, 2015), delivering localized forecast information to people using smart devices around the world. Part of daily routines, these predictive broadcasts help us to decide on imminent and future courses of action: whether to hold the children’s birthday party outside, walk to the shop now or later, wear a thick coat or light T-shirt. Weather forecasts further inform routinized practices at different scales in determining when crops are planted, yachters set sail and holiday seasons are demarcated.

Weather forecasting is itself expressive of a large, routinized operation installed to produce daily schedules organized to collect, analyse and disseminate forms of information. The emergence of the science of meteorology in the 19th century was primarily initiated to minimize loss of life at sea and develop enhanced measuring devices such as anemometers, thermometers, rain gauges and barometers to more accurately capture weather patterns over time. Since these times, technological advances have forged a vast, organized infrastructure that has progressively enrolled radar and satellite technologies, a systematic and bureaucratic infrastructure productive of routinized engagement with the weather. Analysis of weather has become a global endeavour, reflected in transnational systems of forecasting. Globally there are over 10,000 weather stations collecting surface-level data, 1,000 in the upper-air, more than 7,000 ships and 1,000 drifting buoys in the oceans and over 3,000 commercial aircraft measuring ‘key parameters of the atmosphere, land and ocean surface every day’ (WMO, 2020). Importantly, daily measuring is critical in understanding human action and impact as weather data becomes indisputable evidence of anthropogenic climate change. Accordingly, weather is a global phenomenon that is sensed locally. When checking the forecast on our phone, radio or national meteorology website, we momentarily glimpse the international network of weather that connects places near and far. Increasingly, these ‘global’ aspects of weather have become part of popular cultural consciousness.

Although weather pervades everyday experience, in contemporary times a battery of technologies and managed environments keeps it at bay and moderates its force. As Vannini and Austin (2020: 1) suggest, we undertake practices ‘through which we control, modify, endure, adapt to, enjoy, or remove ourselves from the weather-places we inhabit’. Most obviously, the donning of wellington boots, hats, thick coats and many other forms of clothing is part of an everyday adaptation to weather, and these are accompanied by the shielding effects of umbrellas and parasols. These efforts to ameliorate the effects of weather on bodies have been intensified by climatically controlled indoor environments. For those who can afford it, central heating spreads warmth across domestic space in wintry months, with patio heaters extending heat to the outside realms of homes, bars and restaurants. Air conditioning cools air to minimize the sweat and discomfort posed by heat. As a consequence of these highly managed environments, for many in the Global North, the increasingly sequestered lifestyles of interior environments insulate people from the effects of the weather (Oppermann et al., 2018). The recent pandemic lockdowns have drawn stark attention to the inequalities in experiencing weather. We have seen news about many who are unable to seek shelter or are dealing with inadequate lodgings (Ismail, 2020; Levin, 2020). Keeping out of the weather and ‘sheltering in place’ in comfortable climate-controlled interiors is primarily for those in the middle-class and white-collar professions. Russell Hitchings (2010: 282) explores how legal professionals working in an office in London were often unaware of seasonal change, so untroubled by the outside weather that they felt ill-equipped to negotiate a sudden cold spell in the weather, as the

smart shoes he habitually wore could not get sufficient grip onto the icy pavement beneath them and a professional persona was suddenly undermined by the necessity of grabbing onto railings and whatever else that was immediately available.

Hitchings’ example contrasts with Susannah Clement’s exploration in Chapter 4 of the practical, nuanced ways in which mothers with children negotiate the occasionally rainy conditions of Wollongong, Australia. Clement highlights that when families decide whether to face the rain or shine outside, they negotiate external conditions by selecting appropriate clothing materials and articulate discourses of comfort wherein weather conditions are perceived as invigorating or uncomfortable.

Perhaps because of these routines instilled in daily life that inure people to variations and extreme weather events, and thereby disorient our ‘local’ weather knowledge, we are yet to adapt to climate changes to come. Yet increasingly, occasions are emerging in which everyday apprehensions of weather in place are dramatized through the acceleration of human-induced climate and environmental change. The advent of increasing incidents of strange weather in local contexts is allied to a growing awareness of floods, bushfires, heatwaves, droughts and tornadoes to consolidate a sense that global climate patterns are awry. Thus ‘climate processes are imbricated with ecological and human processes’ (Clifford and Travis, 2018: 8) that exceed the abstractions of science. As Katharine Haynes, Matalena Tofa and Joshua Whittaker exemplify in Chapter 12, a small Australian town, formerly conceived by its inhabitants as a safe idyll, undergoes a total transformation as a bushfire fuelled by strong winds sweeps through it. The sensory stimulation that they capture in their interviews with local residents points towards the pervasive, emotional and embodied experiences of weather. Descriptions that account for the effects of the powerful wind on bodies and the heat caught in their throats evoke chaotic, immersive scenes and the stark reality of these extreme weather events. The scent of ash and smoke in the air left a community anticipating their fate, foretelling of evacuations and upheaval. These extreme weather events were watched by the world as wildfires raged in the Amazon, Indonesia and Siberia, and an excruciating eight months of bushfires in Australia destroyed over 19 million hectares in 2019–2020, setting an unprecedented backdrop for the ‘new normal’ of living with unpredictable weather. In fact, the Australian bushfires were so large they created their own micro-weather systems (Badlan, 2019), producing storms, lightning and tornadoes. For over half of the Australian population, a long spell of poor air quality and the constant scent of smoke pervaded daily experience, and everyday routines were transformed through the constant checking of weather forecasts, watching for emergency services advice, the wearing of face masks and, for many communities, planning for imminent disruption.

Exceptional weather is nothing new, however, and frequently offers opportunities for overturning usual everyday routines and schedules, while also providing memories of times when quotidian habits were suspended. Folk memories endure of London’s Frost Fairs, staged when the River Thames froze, providing an occasion for trade, drinking and eating, music and dance on the frozen ice. Similarly, uncanny and rare episodes in which frogs and fish descend from the sky having been swept up by strong updraughts during a storm are part of the folk memories of particular places. We are seeing an echo of these folk tales as long-term weather events disrupt ecological balances: droughts produce conditions for mass fish deaths, and heat waves are so powerful that birds drop dead from the trees in which they shelter. While in the past, such extraordinary weather may have surprised, entertained or unsettled communities, it now urges us to forge stronger connections with the environments that we inhabit. This connection is notably and continuingly strong in Indigenous communities, as can be seen in the declarations of the Rights of Nature. Acknowledging the value of Indigenous knowledge, Ecuador included the right of Pachamāma (Mother Earth) in its constitution and in other contexts, rivers such as the Whanganui River in New Zealand, or the Yamuna River in India, have received a legal right for ‘personhood’ (Youatt, 2017). The Ngāi Tūhoe in New Zealand are the children of mist and Hine-pukoho-rangi, the Mist Maiden, is their ancestor from whom their iwi (tribe) has originated. In this book we foreground a dynamic intermingling between bodies and weather, including nonhuman entities: trees, plants, rocks, bricks, birds, water, dolphins, ships and aeroplanes.

In Chapter 14, Sarah Wright, Lara Daley and Faith Curtis highlight how weather has been long understood as agential within many Indigenous cosmologies. They, for example, draw from the work of Warlpiri man Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick (2015), they explain how ‘the cloud that’s formed after the hot air and cold air meet and interact’ leads to new understandings. Wright, Daley and Curtis explain that ‘Indigenous peoples [are] continuing to know and live with weather in diverse and placed-based ways’. Since the colonial establishment of Australian governance and capital, they contend, ‘place has been weathered in deeply racist, entitled and possessive ways across time and space’. Racist notions of weather throughout Australian colonial history have played a strong role in choosing the capital. Aboriginal resistance against (post)colonial normative perceptions is at the core of Chapter 14, with the authors advocating for a movement beyond dominant Western narratives of weather.

Affecting both Indigenous and non-indigenous peoples, everyday modes of inhabiting place are traumatically upturned by climatic events. Such awareness, compounded by the connections with increasingly volatile weather in other places, chimes with local conditions. Mick Hulme (2017...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: placing weather
• 2 Research in weather: notes on climate, seasons, weather and fieldwork mobilities
• 3 Moved by wind and storms: imaginings in a changing landscape
• 4 Walking with the rain: sensing family mobility on-foot
• 5 Running with the weather: the case of marathon
• 6 Unexpected turbulence in aeromobilities
• 7 Seafarers and weather
• 8 Snow matters: from romantic background to creative playground in alpine tourist practices
• 9 Making the Santa Ana wind legible: the aeolian production of Los Angeles
• 10 Seeing with Australian light: representations and landscapes
• 11 Foggy landscapes
• 12 Sensing bushfire: exploring shifting perspectives as hazard moves through the landscape
• 13 Bangla bricks: constellations of monsoonal mobilities
• 14 Weathering colonisation: Aboriginal resistance and survivance in the siting of the capital
• 15 Dwelling and weather: farming in a mobilised climate
• 16 Nuclear warfare and weather (im)mobilities: from mushroom clouds to fallout
• 17 Writing (extra)planetary geographies of weather-worlds
• Index