We Always get the Weather We Deserve
This week's Kit Smart blog is an excerpt from the 2019 'Martlet' alumni magazine written by Professor Mike Hulme (2018), Professor of Human Geography.
Human anxieties about a disorderly climate are longstanding and are manifest today in the popular descriptions of climatic change, such as ‘weather weirding’ or ‘climate chaos’. Climate is an idea which performs important functions in stabilising relationships between the human experience of weather and cultural life, and so when physical climates appear to change the search for explanation becomes pressing. Physical climates change through time; but so too do theories of climatic causation. Explanatory accounts of why climates change do not remain static. As cultures evolve, often in response to experiences of environmental change, cross-cultural encounters, new scientific knowledge and technological innovation, so too do explanations of climatic change and variability.
The idea of a stable climate has been readily associated with the idea of a stable cosmic order in which relationships between humans, non-humans, and the spirits or gods are as they should be. For many cosmologies, disruption to any part of this triadic relationship may yield adverse consequences for the behaviour of the weather and so challenge the human experience of a stable climate. If God, deities or the spirits are powerful, awesome, and just, then a prerequisite for retaining a beneficent climate is for humans to maintain good and appropriate relations with these entities. But if the gods are merely capricious, then various petitions, offerings, and sacrifices have been seen as being necessary for appeasing them, thereby maintaining the orderly weather around which human life can at least survive, if not flourish.
Within such worldviews it is both normal and sensible to search for the hand and motives of a good and just God when climates start to change for the worse, or to acknowledge the anger of the spirits when weather appears to become abnormally extreme or destructive. Explanations for changes in climate such as these are frequently found in historical cultures and remain prevalent in the world today. European societies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, struggled to comprehend a climatic period which encompassed some very severe winters and cold, damp summers. Religious songs and prayers written at the time reveal the contemporary value of a theistic explanatory framework. The German hymn writer and poet Paul Gerhardt (1607-1676), for example, wrote ‘Song of Confession and Prayer Occasioned by Great and Unseasonable Rain’ in the 1640s. In this extended poem Gerhardt looks to God for an understanding of the climatic perturbations he and his contemporaries in central Europe were then experiencing, and also for a resolution to their experience.
Supernatural and natural theories of climatic change are not simply alternative discrete accounts which people have found useful to explain the (usually) unwelcome inconstancy of climate. They rarely present as two mutually exclusive options from which to select. Neither is it possible to develop a chronological account of changing theories of agency, in which naturalistic explanations of climatic change have gradually squeezed and then finally supplanted supernatural ones. Both categories of explanation have co-existed for most of recorded history, even if their respective salience and cultural authority has varied over time.
Yet there are moments in human history when ideas of climate and its causes change rapidly. In other words, there are particular times and places when new ideas about the world emerge and become creative and culturally authoritative. With respect to theories of climatic change one such place and moment was western Europe in the nineteenth century. It was here and then that the novel idea that climates could change over vast epochs without reference to God’s immediate agency became rapidly accepted across the western world. Rather than 6,000 years of a divinely maintained climate, it became possible to imagine that the Earth may have manifested many large fluctuations in climate during a ‘deep past’ consisting of millions of years. With the realisation of the vast natural forces required for global climate to vacillate through repeated glacial cycles, the search was on to identify the precise causal agents, beyond God, of such disruptions.
Supernatural entities may be believed to cause climates to change, and they may do so through either natural or supernatural means; i.e., with or without accompanying naturalistic explanations. Climates may also change for entirely natural reasons, as in the scientific understanding of glacial cycles. At best, however, this is only a partial description of how people commonly think about the causes of climatic change. Human agency is implicated in most supernatural accounts of climatic causation in diverse and complex ways. And similar complexities frequently abound when thinking about human agency and natural causation. Indeed, most cultures have been keen to accommodate human agency in these supernatural and natural chains of explanation. God does not act independently of human behaviour and nor is nature unresponsive to human actions.
The boundaries between these different modes of explanation are far from clear, are never static, and are frequently contested. Aristotle and his disciples believed that human-cleared forests caused the climate of Philippi to warm. Monotheists believed that it was human wickedness which provoked God to intervene to cause the Flood. And in post-revolutionary France in the early nineteenth century, the socialist Charles Fourier was convinced there was a decline in the health of planetary climate caused by human greed. One should be wary of a presumptive exceptionalism which thinks that it is only late-modern westernised cultures which have identified a role for human agency in causing climates to change.
Different cosmologies, religious thought, political ideologies, social practices and scientific paradigms of knowledge all contribute to the rich cultural matrix in which theories of climatic change and causation have emerged, flourished and declined. It is exceptional for humans to think that climates change for either natural or supernatural reasons alone. Far more common in human history, and indeed perhaps still today, is to believe that the performance of climate is tied to the behaviours of morally-accountable human actors. People tend to think that we get the weather we deserve.
"Rainbow!"by Dark center of the universe is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
