Table Of ContentA Cultural History of Climate Change
Charting innovative directions in the environmental humanities, this book examines
the cultural history of climate change under three broad headings: history, writing
and politics. Climate change compels us to rethink many of our traditional means
of historical understanding, and demands new ways of relating human knowledge,
action and representations to the dimensions of geological and evolutionary time.
To address these challenges, this book positions our present moment of climatic
knowledge within much longer histories of climatic experience. Only in light of
these histories, it argues, can we properly understand what climate means today
across an array of discursive domains, from politics, literature and law to activism
and neighbourly conversation. Its chapters identify turning points and experiments
in the construction of climates and of atmospheres of sensation. They examine how
contemporary ecological thought has repoliticised the representation of nature and
detail vital aspects of the history and prehistory of our climatic modernity.
This groundbreaking text will be of great interest to researchers and postgradu-
ate students in environmental history, environmental governance, history of ideas
and science, literature and eco-criticism, political theory and cultural theory, as well
as all general readers interested in climate change.
Tom Bristow is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence
for the History of Emotions, University of Melbourne, Australia.
Thomas H. Ford is a Lecturer in English at Monash University, Australia.
Routledge Environmental Humanities
Series editors: Iain McCalman and Libby Robin
Editorial Board
Christina Alt, St Andrews University, UK
Alison Bashford, University of Cambridge, UK
Peter Coates, University of Bristol, UK
Thom van Dooren, University of New South Wales, Australia
Georgina Endfield, University of Nottingham, UK
Jodi Frawley, University of Sydney, Australia
Andrea Gaynor, The University of Western Australia, Australia
Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA
Jennifer Newell, American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA
Simon Pooley, Imperial College London, UK
Sandra Swart, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota, USA
Paul Warde, University of East Anglia, UK
Jessica Weir, University of Western Sydney, Australia
International Advisory Board
William Beinart, University of Oxford, UK
Sarah Buie, Clark University, USA
Jane Carruthers, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, USA
Paul Holm, Trinity College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland
Shen Hou, Renmin University of China, Beijing
Rob Nixon, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Pauline Phemister, Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of
Edinburgh, UK
Deborah Bird Rose, University of New South Wales, Australia
Sverker Sorlin, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Royal Institute of
Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Helmuth Trischler, Deutsches Museum, Munich and Co-Director, Rachel Carson
Centre, LMU Munich University, Germany
Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University, USA
Kirsten Wehner, Head Curator, People and the Environment, National Museum of
Australia
The Routledge Environmental Humanities series is an original and inspiring venture recognising
that today’s world agricultural and water crises, ocean pollution and resource depletion,
global warming from greenhouse gases, urban sprawl, overpopulation, food insecurity and
environmental justice are all crises of culture.
The reality of understanding and finding adaptive solutions to our present and future
environmental challenges has shifted the epicentre of environmental studies away from an
exclusively scientific and technological framework to one that depends on the human-
focused disciplines and ideas of the humanities and allied social sciences.
We thus welcome book proposals from all humanities and social sciences disciplines for
an inclusive and interdisciplinary series. We favour manuscripts aimed at an international
readership and written in a lively and accessible style. The readership comprises scholars and
students from the humanities and social sciences and thoughtful readers concerned about the
human dimensions of environmental change.
Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities
Jodi Frawley and Iain McCalman
The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress
An environmental history
Cameron Muir
The Biosphere and the Bioregion
Essential writings of Peter Berg
Cheryll Glotfelty and Eve Quesnel
Sustainable Consumption and the Good Life
Interdisciplinary perspectives
Edited by Karen Lykke Syse and Martin Lee Mueller
The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis
Rethinking modernity in a new epoch
Edited by Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil and François Gemenne
Nature, Environment and Poetry
Ecocriticism and the poetics of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes
Susanna Lidström
Whole Earth Thinking and Planetary Coexistence
Ecological wisdom at the intersection of religion, ecology, and philosophy
Sam Mickey
Endangerment, Biodiversity and Culture
Edited by Fernando Vidal and Nélia Dias
A Cultural History of Climate Change
Edited by Tom Bristow and Thomas H. Ford
Ecopolitical Homelessness
Defining place in an unsettled world
Gerard Kuperus
“As Gro Harlem Brundtland famously observed, “Current environmental problems
require that we move beyond compartmentalization to draw the very best of our
intellectual resources from every field of endeavor.” This valuable collection of
essays from a globally diverse group of historians and cultural scholars expands
those resources in valuable ways by revealing new dimensions of the discourses sur-
rounding climate change and the Anthropocene.”
—James Rodger Fleming, Charles A. Dana Professor of Science,
Technology, and Society, Colby College, Maine, USA
“Understanding the way climate change is altering the world – imaginatively as
much as materially – requires the serious engagement of humanities scholars who
can bring with them great depths of insight about how and why humans reason and
imagine. This volume is the first to bring together leading contemporary humani-
ties scholarship about climate change into a single coherent setting. The chapters
help us to think together about what changes in our climates mean. They show that
the humanities are not simply a late-arriving appendage to Earth System science, to
help merely in the work of translation. Their distinctive insights necessarily alter the
ways in which the idea of climate change can be conceptualized and acted upon.”
—Mike Hulme, King’s College London, UK
A Cultural History of
Climate Change
Edited by Tom Bristow and
Thomas H. Ford
First published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 selection and editorial matter, Tom Bristow and Thomas H. Ford; individual chapters, the
contributors
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used
only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bristow, Tom (Cultural historian), editor. | Ford, Thomas H. (Literary historian), editor.
Title: A cultural history of climate change / edited by Tom Bristow and Thomas H. Ford.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, Earthscan, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015045018| ISBN 9781138838161 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315734590 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Climatic changes—Social aspects. | Climatic changes—History. | Human
ecology—Cross-cultural studies. | Anthropology.
Classification: LCC QC903 .C865 2016 | DDC 363.738/7409—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045018
ISBN: 978-1-138-83816-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-73459-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by diacriTech, Chennai
Contents
List of figures ix
List of contributors xi
Acknowledgements xv
Foreword xvii
DIPESH CHAKRABARTY
Climates of history, cultures of climate 1
TOM BRISTOW AND THOMAS H. FORD
PART I
Climates of history 15
1 Voices of endurance: climate and the power of oral history 17
DEB ANDERSON
2 Rethinking seasons: changing climate, changing time 38
CHRIS O’BRIEN
3 The terrestrial envelope: Joseph Fourier’s
geological speculation 55
JEROME WHITINGTON
4 Melancholy and the continent of fire 72
TOM BRISTOW AND ANDREA WITCOMB
5 The Anthropocene and the long seventeenth
century: 1550–1750 87
LINDA WILLIAMS
viii Contents
PART II
Climates of writing 109
6 Change beyond belief: fictions of (the) Enlightenment and
Simpson’s ‘climate change suite’ 111
JAYNE LEWIS
--
7 Fuels and humans, bíos and zoe 128
KAREN PINKUS
8 The ‘foreign grave’ motif in Victorian
medicine and literature 138
ROSLYN JOLLY
9 Climate change and literary history 157
THOMAS H. FORD
PART III
Climates of politics 175
10 Climate change: politics, excess, sovereignty 177
NICK MANSFIELD
11 Para-religions of climate change: humanity,
eco-nihilism, apocalypse 192
S. ROMI MUKHERJEE
12 Litigation, activism, and the paradox of lawfulness in an
age of climate change 211
NICOLE ROGERS
13 This is not my beautiful biosphere 229
TIMOTHY MORTON
Index 239
Figures
2.1 Gurruwilyun Yolnu seasons – Gäwa Gurruwilyun Seasons Poster 40
2.2 January Rainfall, Darwin, 1870–1942 47
2.3 April Rainfall, Darwin, 1869–1941 47
2.4 July Rainfall, Darwin, 1869–1941 48
2.5 October Rainfall, Darwin, 1869–1941 48
4.1 Water Zone, Forest Gallery 75
4.2 Visitors on Boardwalk, Forest Gallery 77
4.3 The Kinglake Chimney installation, Forest Gallery 83
