Historical geography III

Karl Offen

doi:10.1177/0309132513501429

Abstract

My third report covering recent research in historical geography focuses on climate, and particularly scholarship that explores how the meaning of climate and climate change varies in distinct cultural and temporal contexts. Viewing climate science, and more specifically interpretations of climate science, as a discourse amenable to cultural criticism suggests that notions of climate are and have always been a physical and social phenomenon. Reviewed research suggests that ideas of climate and climate change are intertwined with social mores, politics and institutions, philosophies of civilization and progress, and inseparable from the cultural expressions that give them meaning and, thus, are far too important to be left to climate scientists to narrate or interpret.

Highlights

Her research tells a tale of cultural resiliency, and of a vibrant humanity coping with an uncertain future. What all these indigenous and ethnographic studies implicitly reveal is that present activities responding to the impacts of climate change are steeped in knowledge of past geographies
While many commentators are lining up to tell us what this means for global climate change and what steps need to be taken to avert devastating consequences, studies show that the public is not well informed about nor connected to the issue
Some of the research presented here suggests that people and communities are or can be engaged with weather and climate issues if discussions are rooted in place, presented in an appropriate language, and/or conceptually linked to meanings that resonate culturally with people at local or community levels

Summary

Introduction

And opening spaces for humanistic scholarship on climate and climate change, seeks to complicate climate discourses and inspire new social understandings, criticisms, and practices (see Howe, 2011; Sabin, 2010) Some scholars aim their critique of climate change discourse squarely at a capitalist system that on the one hand demands the unending economic growth that drives climate change, while on the other hand obscures the uneven landscapes of human vulnerability that the system largely created, all the while supporting technical fixes that commodify the atmosphere and address neither the drivers of climate change nor those most vulnerable to its effects (Liverman, 2009; see Cupples, 2012; Head and Gibson, 2012; Parenti, 2011). A third assemblage examines the changing historical geographies attributed to climate change in specific places

Climate and the human experience

Ideas and meanings of climate

Climate-society geographies

Conclusion