The Human Drama of Weather

Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans on August 28, 2005, remains a stark reminder that weather—in this case severe weather—is not simply a natural phenomenon. The role of technology and science, local and federal government responsibility, social and racial inequities, and personal sacrifice, as well as compassion, are as central to the event as the rains and high water. Weather, from the most devastating storm to the most ordinary sunny day, is not only a natural but also a deeply cultural, social, and political event. Global warming is another vital case in point. Its human and natural causes and their impacts are intertwined. To paraphrase Raymond Williams' famous quotation about nature, weather contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history (1980). The best studies of weather, therefore, not only reveal something about the climate but also about how people think about and react to their environment and to each other.

None of us can ignore the weather. Or we do so at our own peril. People often make the most prosaic choices (what to wear and when to vacation) as well as the most significant life decisions (where to live and work) based on the weather. People often use the weather to define a sense of identity. Many residents of the U.S. Northern Rockies, for example, have taken pride in their inclement winter weather as a source of strength, which they transform into a sense of regional pride. Think Miami, Los Angeles, or the entire state of Maine. Studies of weather are some of the most powerful environmental histories because, when done well, they can show us how profoundly the environment factors into the shape and function of societies and cultures.

Whether because of familiarity with one's locale, folk belief, or even arthritis, many feel they can predict the weather as well, if not better, than the professionals. Sailors may rely on the latest equipment to track a storm front in their path, but they also know that the storm could defy any predictions. The experts' fluctuating rates of accuracy have perhaps contributed to this tradition. Will it rain or not? The history of weather forecasting has tended to pit the authority of science against both common knowledge and religious faith. As we seek the causes of weather disasters, we engage in debates on individual, professional, and governmental blame and responsibility. Just as any good environmental history is about much more than environment, weather history should be about a lot more than weather. And it should be interdisciplinary. The most interesting works in the genre reveal underlying tensions and connections among topics within art, science, religion, and public policy (to name just a few disciplines), which are not visible when one examines the topics in isolation from one another.

A good history of weather, in sum, should tell us quite a lot about how weather shapes people and how people shape the weather. It should analyze, too, the intersection of ideas and materiality. There are, in fact, a number of wonderful books on the weather. Some of the books that have done all this best are not explicitly about weather. Some are not overtly scholarly. For example, Donald Worster's Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1989) is a classic work in the fields of American environmental and agricultural history that convincingly argues that the era's devastating dust storms were not simply a natural disaster but a consequence of capitalist modes of agricultural production. And urban histories, such as Mike Davis' Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998) and John McPhee's "L.A. Against the Mountains" in his anthology Control of Nature (1989), chronicle with engaging detail the dual human and natural forces that have generated the city's devastating fires and...