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TWO FAMOUS QUOTATIONS begin: Everybody talks about the weather. Their punch lines both criticize chatter, but toopposite ends. But nobody ever does anything about it, jokes Charles Dudley Warner; Ulrike Meinhof finishes, we dont. Attribution is shaky, but the two names that get attached, an American newspaperman and co-author of The Gilded Age with Mark Twain, and a German journalist and RAF terrorist, represent two divergent responses to the capitalist climate of their time. Warner made a moral critique of the rapacious captains of the Second Industrial Revolution and stopped there. Meinhof left critique behind for violent intervention. But what of their shared horizon? Why bring up talking about the weather in order not to? We may all do it, but we almost always wish we were talking about something else. Conversation about the weather is supposed to reflect an alienated lack of common subject matter: the awkward dialogue between customer and clerk, the last resort of the lonely party guest. It is for strangers to discuss, and always as a segue into something more serious, more personal. The weather is so contentless as to evade all significant discourse,
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but then its also so universal as to underpin it. Simultaneously too large and too small, the weather laughs as silently at our small talk as when we shout to the heavens. These days the weather is serious business. Not only because developers are taking over hurricane-devastated neighborhoods, nor due to the advertising millions each weather event promises news networks, nor the billions in federal relief for cities, but because it points to that most serious of eventualities: the coming climate apocalypse. The first thing any climatologist will tell you is that weather is not the singular of climate, and its an annual tradition to laugh at some global warming denier taunting Al Gore while pointing at snow collecting on his DC windowsill. But the laughs have become increasingly bitter. Last year was the hottest on record, and no one 27 or younger has ever lived through a colder than average month. People out west sympathized a little grudgingly with the Eastern Seaboards Sandy hysteria after their nearly yearlong droughtthe worst drought since 1988, itself the worst since the Dust Bowl yearswas largely ignored in the media. While we cant control the weather though we affect itits clear that the way we talk about it matters.

In this issue of The New Inquiry, we look at how speaking about complex meteorological systems masks or uncovers equally complex social systems of control. We interview ecocritic Ursula Heise, who highlights how two ancient rhetorical modes, the pastoral and the apocalyptic, still determine how we interpret scientific data about the weather, what they leave out, and what new modes are developing to talk about our new place in domesticated nature. Stephanie Bernhards Climate Changed forecasts similar modal shifts in literature. Investigating the role climate has played in recent novels, she places November 2012 in league with Virginia Woolf s on or about December, 1910, as a marker for a periodic change in the literary orientation toward the world, where it will no longer be possible to ignore climate change in day-to-day life. Gerry Canavan traces the green streak in apocalyptic science fiction in his Apres Nous, Le Deluge, from H. G. Wellss War of the Worlds to Pixars Wall-E. He sees in the evolution of millennial sci-fi a complication of the pathetic fallacy by a growing awareness of the Anthropocene. And A. M. Gittlitz and Cosmo Bjorkenheim in Humid, All Too Humid question if weather can be the subject of his7

tory, and, if not, why the state, capital and eco-activists find it desirable to act like it is. In World of Weathercraft, Jenna Brager and Bailey Kier stay up all night to discover the truth about chemtrails and HAARP: that weather control is an all-too-real military obsession. A more benign obsession appears in Amanda Shapiros Not For Prophet, tracing the disillusionment of The Weather Channels hardcore fans with the cable companys shark-jumping weather-tainment. Weather forecasters play a central, reassuring role in the lives of man, as modern-day prophets and students of an imperfect science, but now navigate these from a third position: business-person, tweaking rain predictions for ratings. Glenn Becks new sci-fi novel, Agenda 21, uses one of his favorite strategic ploys: stealing the methods of left-wing populism for right-wing demagoguery. Reviewer Jeff Sparrow pulls apart the contradictions inherent to this practiceand this novel. Robert Kaplans attempt to atone for his Iraq war-mongering via geo-political determinism gets taken to task by professional geographer Jason Dittmer, for whom Kaplans fundamental misunderstanding of geography isthe least of his failures. Now even talking about the weather has become very political, cautions Ursula Heise. We agree. As crises mount and the sky above usbegins to change, the weather can be a prompt for serious thinking about the limits of our agencyand, perhaps, a terrain for contestation. But first, we need to sort out what it is were talking about. n

How to Talk About the Weather

URSULA HEISE interviewed by MAX FOX

An interview with the eco-critic Ursula Heise

URSULA HEISE IS a professor of English at UCLA, but she founded the Environmental Humanities Project while at Stanford University, and has served as the President of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. She is in the process of writing a book called Where the Wild Things Used To Be: Narrative, Database and Biodiversity Loss. TNI editor Max Fox spoke to her over the phone for an interview, which you can find an edited transcript of below.

talking about the weather as a synecdoche for empty social interaction. Well, thats changed vastly of course over the last 10 years. Now even talking about the weather has become very political. Your background is in literary studies and narratology in particular. How did you come to environmental science and environmental critique? Was that part of the change of the past 10 years? Well, youre right, though my shift was a little earlier. My background is in comparative-literature studies. Over the course of the 90s, I became increasingly interested in environmental issues, but that wasnt something
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URSULA HEISE: So you wanted to talk about the weather, or is that just a synecdoche for ecological crisis at large? TNI: Thats interesting. I had thought of

HOW TO TALK ABOUT THE WEATHER

that was being looked at in literary studies at the time. All the other big social movements of the 1960ssay, civil rights, decolonization, the struggle for womens rightsthose had all transformed literary studies from the 1970s onward. Environmental activism had not, and I think there are particular intellectual and disciplinary reasons why, but by the 90s the scene had changed. I think the reason has to do with the study of narrative and the study of metaphor. Those are two things that are really important for understanding what environmentalists talk about, how they talk about it, and how people who advocate against certain environmental measures or against the environmental movement more broadly, how they frame their argument. Its important to understand the narrative and the literary genres that often underwrite our ideas about nature. When I teach students how to look at contemporary environmental literature, I definitely want them to know something about a genre like the pastoral. The pastoral is a 2000-year-old genre that celebrates the simple, innocent life of the countryside. Its had a very long history since then and especially since the Romantic age, its become a powerful narrative against industrialization and modernization, as both a refuge and a tool by which we articulate resistance to certain forms of modernization. A lot of environmentalist discourse up to the present day is written in or at least underwritten by the pastoral. Another important narrative genre, especially in the context of climate change, is
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the apocalyptic. It is a narrative about the end of the world which had religious origins but got secularized particularly but not only in the U.S. and has often been used less as a tool to forecast precisely what events are going to transpire than as a call to social reform. The direr the scenario is, the more urgent is the call to reform. So I think its impossible to understand a good deal of environmental writing and thinkingparticularly since the 1960swithout knowing something about these genres and the force these exert on the way that we think about whatever scientific data we get about nature. In recent years I think the apocalyptic narrative has been on the rise again, especially after the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit and the growing frustration in the environmental community with crucial legislative and treaty actions not being taken. But we always need to keep in mind that in part it is the narrative that drives the way in which the data are being taken across and thats an important part of what we look at not so much to say that the narratives get it wrong, but to say in what ways do the narratives shape the data. How do they connect them up so that a certain understanding is presented and what other narratives might also be possible. Given that climate is changing in unprecedented ways and the way we talk about it is still through these ancient rhetorical modes, do you think were going to see the emergence of new narrative strategies to talk about the new climate reality?

MAX FOX

I think its going to be a mix. I think the older forms, the older narrative templates wont disappear and theyll play their role. But I think were also seeing the emergence of other narratives. I do think there is something underway that I would call nothing less than a seismic shift in environmentalist thought. One of them would be the idea of the anthropocene, which is a term that was coined about a decade ago by the chemical climatologist Paul Crewdson and the ecologist Eugene Stirner. What they meant by that was that were actually in a new geological period in which humans are a geological force. Theyve become geological agents. What they mean by this is weve always been biological agents. Humans have messed around with their environments, with the plants and animals surrounding them for millennia. But weve not had the collective power to actually transform the basic meteorological structures, climactic structures of our planet. The idea is that most of the nature that humans are going to live in and with from here on out will be nature altered for better or for worse by humans. This is generating a whole new way of thinking about nature. In environmentalism its meant a couple of shifts. In American environmentalism, theres traditionally been a great sort of cultural and emotional investment in the preservation of wilderness. You know, the great sort of wild areas that are as pristine as possible and are untouched by humans. It created the National Parks, it created efforts for the conservation of biodiversity. From a histori11

cal viewpoint, its a questionable narrative because what looked to European eyes like wilderness was in fact not or only very partially so. In some cases Europeans dislocated Native Americans to then be able to say this is nature untouched. That sort of dislocation of indigenous people is sort of the infamous legacy of environmentalism in the 19th century, and this was still going on between the 1960s and 80s in Africa. Environmentalism now has very decisively moved away from that, but it was part of veneration for nature untouched by humans. Organizations such of the Nature Conservancy based a lot of their philosophy on that idea. Now theres a move away from that where people are saying theres very little wilderness left thats accessible to anybody. There is, in fact, no wilderness left if you take into account climate change has now altered even the last little spot of jungle or an icy part of the Arctic or the depths of the ocean where no human has ever yet set foot. Its all been altered through anthropogenic climate change. In a quite literal way there is no part of the planet that hasnt been touched by humans. So we need a different way of thinking and a different story to tell about that. And the anthropoceneenvisioning nature as pervasively reshaped by humans, and thinking about what we might do with nature in the future on that basishas been one productive point of departure. Theres other ideas that have cropped up. Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy, has for at least five or six years now published articles on domes-

HOW TO TALK ABOUT THE WEATHER

ticated nature, the idea that we are really now charged with the task of designing what dealing with nature most of the time that kind of nature well have in the future, so has been one way or another domesticated thats what we need to think about. Who the by humans. So we need to think about not we is who calls the shots on that is of course how do we go back to something thats not a crucial question and what mechanisms we domesticated but what kinds of domesticahave for making collective decisions is I think tion do we want and which kinds do we not one of the key issues confronting environwant. Emma Marris, the science journalist, mentalism now. published a book last year thats been much discussed, whose subtitle is Saving Nature So theres a story you could tell where you in a Post-Wild World. So, you know, how do periodize human interaction with weather you think about the post-wild when there is as going from a priestly or shamanistic efno more wilderness. fort to exert control over it with sympathetic This is focusing very much on Americausal action to a modernist detachment can environmentalism. In many parts of the predicated on being causally separate from world, the idea that conserving nature had the weather, where all we can do is predict it to do with wilderness has always been a bit and exert control that way. But this seems to foreign. In a lot of the developing world, the be a third twist, that through our detached most important environmentalist struggles practices of prediction, we are the ones rehave always been about certain cultural comsponsible once again, and now its really out munities trying to defend their means of subof control. sistence: their water bodies against the building of dams or their forests against converThere is a fascinating history that attaches sion to agribusiness. Thats never been about to our thinking about disaster generally, and preserving a nature that was untouched by the Australian literary scholar Kate Rigby humans but precisely preserving older huworks on precisely this issue. Shes a scholman ways of life. ar of Romanticism. The argument that she But were now seeing a real seismic shift makes is that in Europe, up until the 18th toward seeing nature as domesticated. Were century natural disasters, including weathno longer thinking so much about nature er disastersa thunderstorm, things like going to hell in a handthatused to be looked basketas we cultural at as punishment from scholars say, declentionGod. And the older How do you ist narratives, narratives priestly approach that think about of declinebut trying you alluded to is a verthe post-wild? to think more about narsion of that, where you ratives of design. We are have to pray to the gods
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MAX FOX

for what happened. But as Rigby pointed out, in the context of things like Hurricane Sandy, theres actually an odd downside that emerges from thinking that way about disasters: In the current context of what we know about anthropogenic climate change, it actually tends to hide that we are causing at least some of these disasters. Looking at cultural history, you see the Lisbon earthquake prompting a reevaluation of things like divine providence. But you also get both larger and smaller stories about how El Nio-like events caused droughts and famines in crucial years without which colonialism wouldnt have been able to take hold the way it did, or 1816, the Year without a Summer, when Mary Shelly and Lord Byron and all of them holed up because of abnormal weather and thats how we got Frankenstein. How much do you distinguish culture and history from weather itself? For anybody whos interested in how people live with nature, the interest is not to draw a sharp line but to see how people work certain natural events into their political and cultural project. And youre absolutely right about Mary Shellys Frankenstein. The preface that describes this totally cold and dark and gloomy summer that they spent in Switzerland was for a long time understood to be metaphorical, that it was meant to conjure up an atmosphere of the gothic and the horror that then lent itself to writing the kind of story that Shelly tells in the multiple embed13

to ensure weather that will ensure your survival. There was a particular turning point with the disastrous earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, which killed so many obviously innocent people. The idea that natural disasters were punishments from God came into question among thinkers, writers, philosophers, all the way from Voltaire to Heinrich von Kleist. And gradually that idea got replaced by the more modern idea of natural disaster, that no there is no moral significance here and certainly no divine significance. These are fairly normal events that have to do with the fairly random functioning of nature. In many ways thats been a very good development. It allows you, among other things, to take care of the victims rather than blaming them

HOW TO TALK ABOUT THE WEATHER

ded narratives in the novel, and it took an eco-critic Jonathan Bates, to point out that in fact that was the year after Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia and it was in fact very dark because there was a layer of ash in the atmosphere and harvests froze all over Europe, there were food riots. To what extent this conditioned the cultural product itself I think is open to question. One wouldnt want to go too far in that direction but its certainly interesting to realize that ecological conditions have an impact on cultural production. And thats what I think environmentalism has changed overall: we cant really distinguish human history from natural history anymore. In older forms of intellectual history there was a fairly sharp distinction drawn. But now thats definitely changed, and we now recognize that these boundaries are porous. Our history is not independent of material conditions, many of which are not just out there, but were created by previous generations of humans who changed the natural world for very particular political, cultural, historical reasons of their own. And I think theres new kinds of materialism that follow from that, recognizing the enormous causative and even agential force of the environment. In Mike Daviss Ecology of Fear he talks about the recurring imaginary destruction of Los Angeles as being displaced race or class anxietythat when you are talking about the weather, really what youre talking about is the social. How much would you agree with that analysis?
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I think its very important to look closely at how what we call nature is socially shaped and culturally framed. As an environmentalist Id be a little more reluctant to reduce it to that and say, Theres absolutely no nature outside of our social transactions and outside of our cultural framing. I think thats a much trickier step because that denies theres a noncultural world out there with whose material reality we have to interact, even or especially where we or previous generations have shaped that reality. I think that most environmentalists would be reluctant to accept that strong version of cultural constructivism. That was one of the reasons it was difficult for environmentalism to take hold in cultural studies up until the 1990s. Because that was certainly the prevalent way of thinking about nature that we inherited mostly from a certain kind of poststructuralist tradition. As a graduate student I was trained to look at claims about biology and nature as really camouflaged claims about race, class, and power. That you always claim something is natural when you want to naturalize your own claim to power, your own social position and your own social group. I think part of the environmental turn was a move toward reaffirming that there is a real material world out there. Nature is always out there and surprises and overtakes and changes our social and cultural structures. But Mike Davis is certainly right and I admire a lot of his work in terms of how he shows how nature and natural disasters get mobilized within particular social structures.

MAX FOX

He talks about the fires that break out regularly in parts of L.A. Because McMansions are being built exactly in the canyons where Santa Ana winds will fan any flame that goes up, public money has to be invested to rescue those houses. I think hes very good about pointing out the class and race structures that often exacerbate already existing material conditions and distribute the effects of ecological conditions and disasters very unevenly. Thats very pertinent to climate change as well. Clearly there are certain communities that will be much worse placed politically, financially and socially to avert the worst consequences than others. Regardless of the political or material constraints that we have, what is your assessment of the narrative tools that we have to deal with the weather? Are we able to think of appropriate responses, or are we in fact locked into this older of thinking about the environment that brought us to this place to begin with? I dont think were by any means locked into it. And culture, just as nature, is very dynamic, and the environmental community is vast and multifarious and very, very energetic about coming up with new models of organization and new models of telling stories about nature. But there is often a certain inertia to existing cultural patterns. We need to be aware of what our old patterns are and our old storiesperhaps most important among them that nature is deteriorating, that old story of declinewhat hold they have on
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our thinking and on the possibilities of action. But there isnt a shortage of energy for thinking about this. I dont think we have the narrative templates ready-made, but there are a lot of people who are trying to think about new kinds of narrative. One question it seems to me urgent to ask is why are environmentalists so focused on climate change right now almost to the exclusion of everything else? We have other major crises right underway that are also global. There is a global crisis of toxification, and we have an enormously challenging crisis of biodiversity loss, which Ive spent a lot of my research and writing on. Were losing animal and plant species at a rate that before has only happened at exceptional moments in the history of life on earth. In 3.5 billion years, weve only had five mass extinctions before, and now it looks like were in another one, this time one created by humans. You dont really hear as much about that in the media as you do about climate change, and so a question a cultural scholar has is why do we focus on a certain risk scenario and talk about it almost to the exclusion of other risk scenarios. Is it because climate change gives us the possibility of speaking about apocalyptic scenarios and speaking about the decline of nature in a way that other crises do not? If you look at other phenomena like deforestation and species loss, yes, there is a large scenario, but then when you look at the details there are many different stories, where species are being lost but then other species are thriving, though not in their native habitats. Or you have the story of mas-

HOW TO TALK ABOUT THE WEATHER

sive reforestation in the Amazon thats barely ever reported because we like to think of the Amazon as this area where horrible environmental havoc is being wreaked. We forget to talk about or perhaps deliberately dont talk about the many success stores that environmentalism has had over the past 50 years. So I think we need to be careful about what we choose as the primary crisis. Im sometimes a bit worried that with climate change we have chosen the crisis that is least accessible to the general public. In terms of global policies it seems most difficult to do anything about, as the Doha conference has shown. Now, Im not saying that this is all there is to it. Clearly there are massive interests aligned in the fossil fuel industry that have worked quite effectively to distort the infor16

mation that gets out to the public and to forestall action. But I dont think thats the only problem, especially at the global level. So we also have to give ourselves time on really large-scale crises like this for a very diverse and divergent global community to work its way through these often slow and frustrating processes and come up with solutions that may not be what the most radical environmentalist would wish for but that comes with negotiating the interests of a lot of different people. And for these reasons, Im a little bit worried that were just focusing on climate change. There are a lot of other crises going on. And some of these are much more concrete; theyre much more locally focused, and you can do things about them much more easily than you can about global, systemic issues such as climate change. So thats sort of one issue thats on my mind when I talk about climate change. The other one is the close connection between weather and climate. We experience climate change through weather events, but the difficulty is that we can never be totally sure whether these weather events, which have multiple and often indirect causes, how we can relate them back to the underlying systemic change. When you look at the long-term trends and statistics, its clear where the trends are going, but if you look at individual events that are traumatic, its actually not that easy to then jump back to the more systemic crisis. Thats a really difficult issue we deal with in environmental communication on a daily basis. n

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World of Weathercraft
by JENNA BRAGER and BAILEY KIER

Even if we could control the weather, would we trust ourselves?

Most of the American public take for granted what is happening in the air above them. Most of us dont know that once, as Henry David Thoreau wrote, migrating flocks of birds would darken the sky for days. Looking up is a complicated perceptive and intuitive skill that many humans have lost. We dont have much reason to look up anymoreto predict what the weather might bring us or to tell the time of day or to use the sun or moon for directions to travel. We dont need to look up with the seasons accumulated knowledge and notice the changing light and the necessity to think back and forward in time for that year and predict the first frost, when to sow crops or the onset of seasonal thunder18

storms that will water the crops. The stars are obscured by pollution, we check the weather on our smart phones. If we do look up, it is to see skyscrapers, fireworks, when we hear a fighter jet, to see advertisements or marriage proposals sprayed by an airplane. While we have lost touch with agrarian weather sensitivity, a new sense of weatherdisaster sensitivity has replaced it. Climate change, natural disasters, and (sub)urban apocalypse have become familiar specters. Whether through cautiously grim government speeches, wild media speculation, or the reality show Doomsday Preppers, we are told, more or less, what to buy for a family of four to survive for however many days. We

JENNA BRAGER AND BAILEY KIER

know who to call, what websites to check on our smartphones (for as long as theyll hold a charge). We know who we are meant to trust and who we are meant to fear. In the days leading up to Hurricane Sandys landfall in the U.S., many of us were glued to our televisions and computers, waiting for the most accurate and up-to-date predictions and survival tips (while remaining, for the most part, unaware that Sandy was flooding the homes and USAID tents of thousands of Haitians, inducing mudslides, killing dozens of people and sparking renewed fears of cholera epidemic and food shortages). In a media-induced panic, many on the East Coast spent those days in a consumerist frenzy of preppingfighting traffic to get to the nearest grocery store to clear the shelves of toilet paper, bottled water, dry and canned food, candles, and batteries. Wealthier families holed up in hotels in Baltimore in case of power outages, presumably with the idea that hotels would have generators. Sandy demonstrated what ecologists and activists like Mike Tidwell (author of the 2007 book The Ravaging Tide) have warned us about: that a combination of the right storm and high tide would devastate U.S. coastal cities. It also revealed the multiple facets of fear evoked by climate change, not only in terms of catastrophic weather but also the kinds of ecological, social, and political crises it will produce. As the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy continues to unfold, uneven effects are apparent. In the U.S., many in the hurricanes predicted path have now shoved their candles and bat19

teries in a junk drawer for the next Frankenstorm or Snowpocalypse. The denizens of battered beachside resorts will, for the most part, take their flood insurance money and rebuild. Meanwhile, thousands of low-income people and public-housing residents remain in precarious situations, homeless or without basic necessities like heat and clean water. Globally, as weather becomes more extreme, the poor and the politically vulnerable will continue to pay the highest price of climate change. Discrepancies in media coverage of post-Katrina New Orleans reveal some of the fault lines: White survivors were often portrayed as finding supplies and black survivors as looters, criminalized and targeted by the police and the National Guard. At the same time, transnational corporations will profit from superstorms, drought, sea rise, and other effects of climate change. As Vandana Shivas book Water Wars details, the privatization of water resources is a growing concern, particularly in the global South, where the commodification of water is being pushed by the World Bank and IMF causing rising prices, decreased access and issues with quality deterioration. However, the rhetoric of natural disaster and acts of nature conveys the sense that these things are always beyond our power, that the weather is completely external to effect or intervention. In the growing struggle for ecological and social equity, we must pay attention to the ways in which the U.S. military, affiliated corporations, and governing structures, along with other collaborative and/or competing countries, have been ex-

WORLD OF WEATHERCRAFT

perimenting, researching, and modifying the has often functioned as a way to imagine and weather for at least the past 60 years. inspire future possibilities. Even so, most Despite dire warnings, a new Global Carpeople who speak publicly about weatherbon Project study shows that global greenmodification programs are dismissed as conhouse gas emissions hit an all-time high last spiracy theorists. year, with no indication of a future decrease. Thousands of aircraft fill U.S. skies each Given that the weather is being modified by day. Above any U.S. city, the suburbs, and in the daily actions of the worlds 7 billion hurural areas aircraft can be seen flying in grids man inhabitantsthough significantly more and emitting what the government names so by the global North and its corporations as contrails and conspiracy theorist deem the idea of fixing what we have wrought by chemtrails. The popularized conception adding more science to the mix is appealing: of chemtrails implies that at least some Its all right that we broke the sky, as long as aircraft emissions contain chemical agents we can control it! towards weather control aims, among other As we continue to make the prospect of ideas. Perhaps the prevalence of chemtrails abrupt climate change increasingly ineviin conspiracy theories is precisely because of table, will weather control become an attracthe ability to locate them empirically, to lotive option? Will it be a possibility? cate them as a visible sign of the possibility of There are publicly accessible and accepted more insidious, less visible ecological interconversations happening in the scientific and ventions. It is unknown if these thousands of policymaking communities about possible aircraft are emitting the exhaust of jet fuel or uses of weather modification to offset global they are spraying something into the atmowarming. The use of cloud seeding to aid agsphere. But the perpetual clouds that these riculture and reservoirs is a common, though aircraft create most likely contribute to the scientifically dubious, practice. Weather conongoing devastation of Earths systemic ecoltrol is a common plot device in science ficogieshumans need vitamin D and plants, tion, showing up in films like The Avengers, plants need light to optimally photosyntheshows like Doctor Who and Star Trek, the size, squirrels need the nuts and nest leaves Michael Crichton novel State of Fear, Judge that trees make. Dredd comics and so forth. The idea of comWhen it became apparent that Sandy plete control over the weatherthe ability would hit the East Coast, conspiracy theoto press a button for a rists hypothesized that sunny day or send a lothe Obama administraWill weather calized blizzard over an tion made this happen control become an enemy armyremains deliberately to showcase the stuff of science fican effective response by attractive option? tion, but science fiction the National Guard and
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JENNA BRAGER AND BAILEY KIER

FEMA before the election, contrasting favorably with the Bush administrations handling of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath in 2005. While it may seem crazy that conspiracy theorists speculate that a U.S. president would have the power and technology create and steer hurricanes for political gain, it seems more useful to not simply dismiss this because it sounds crazy, but begin to ask the hard questions. Why are so many of us are willing to call it crazy without any questioning as to why such crazy claims are being made? The ability, if it exists or could exist, for the government and military to manufacture and control weather is indeed a frightening thoughtespecially if youre of the mindset that governments and their militaries (or militaries and their governments) have and never will be benevolent. For decades, large sectors of the U.S. public trusted the government and banking industry because times were good enough for the voices and bodies that count in our society those who pointed to the financial conditions that predicted the economic crises of 2008 were often deemed conspiracy theorists or extremists. But after all the lost homes, jobs, retirement accounts, health, and consumption futures for millions of middle class and respectable working class Americans, looking up the economic chain became not only necessary, but a normal public discourse almost everyone was familiar with. What do we have to lose by questioning and investigating claims of crazy conspiracy theorists, that weather can or will be manufactured and possibly controlled by military and govern21

ing forces? What do we have to lose by not questioning the realities and potentialities of weather control in the hands of classified military research and applications, and the corporate privatized partnerships that produce these capabilities? How do we begin talking about the historical and contemporary realities of weather control and modification in a way that doesnt rely on fear and ignorance? How do we think about weather modification in way that garners capabilities for large-scale transnational public discussions about the future of the planet and its weather and water systems? What will it take for us to start looking up, up into the sky and up into the ranks researching, modifying, patenting, and privatizing water and weather? Will we need our homes flooded or torn apart by storms? Will we need to become thirstier for the disappearing water tables than for our oversized homes and high definition television sets? Conspiracy theorists claim that it is possible to create and steer (intentionally direct) super storms, as well as induce earthquakes by the use of ionospheric heaters. Whether or not it is in the business of producing super storms, such an ionospheric heater exists, located in Gakona, Alaska, and owned by the Department of Defense. The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) publicly claims itself as an ionospheric research center, beaming millions of watts of electricity into the earths ionosphere to research high frequency long-distance radio waves used in everyday applications such as GPS and trans-oceanic communications

WORLD OF WEATHERCRAFT

systems. The ionosphere is a layer of the Earths atmosphere which protects the planet from solar radiation. Theories about HAARP, ranging from speculations about mind control, earthquakes, and atmospheric weather, are rampant on the Internet. Conspiracy theorists believe that HAARP may be used in the production of hurricanes because of the relationship between ionization and electrification of the atmosphere and storm production. Some
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claim that by beaming millions of watts of electricity into the ionosphere, Department of Defense scientists are attempting to mimic solar flaresand that solar flares have the capability to cause extreme weather events. A common theory argues that chemtrails are a component of HAARP research, and contain metal particles that enhance electricity in the atmosphere. HAARP-induced storms have been imagined as weapons of war and directed disaster that can be used for social control and economic gain (for example through the project of rebuilding). While the idea may seem unbelievable, it may be more useful to focus on potential uses and applications of such technology, rather than its unimaginability. No one could have imagined the atomic bomb or the invention of plastics until they were indeed imagined and produced. We already know that cloud seeding was used in the Vietnam War to induce flooding, that places in Iraq were bombed by the U.S and its allies and then later rebuilt by affiliated corporations, and that major natural disasters have been produced by gentrification and forced migration. As the atmosphere and its water systems become increasingly privatized two domains which humans have never inhabited, but which all life absolutely depends uponwe will have to grapple with how to create public discourse which will strive to democratize geoengineering to mitigate the effects of climate change. It is startling how much researchers and governments have tried to do to gain control over the weather, in documented, public fact.

JENNA BRAGER AND BAILEY KIER

Cloud seeding, the practice of injecting materials such as dry ice or sodium chloride into a cloud to induce precipitation, has been taken up as a way to increase and control rainfall, and to abate fog and hail. As James Fleming describes in The Climate Engineers, during the early years of the Cold War it was hoped that cloud seeding could be used surreptitiously to release the violence of the atmosphere against an enemy, tame the winds in the service of an all-weather air force, or, on a larger scale, perhaps disrupt (or improve) the agricultural economy of nations and alter the global climate for strategic purposes. Indeed, cloud seeding was used between 1967 and 1972 in a program known as Operation POPEYE. At an annual cost of $3.6 million, the Department of Defense worked to induce rain over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, with the goal of reducing Viet Cong mobility. In 1976, after the leaking of the Pentagon Papers and the revelation of Operation POPEYE, the U.N. General Assembly passed the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques to prohibit any technique for changingthrough the deliberate manipulation of natural processesthe dynamics, composition or structure of the Earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space. Despite this, a study compiled for the U.S. Air Force in the mid-1990s, titled Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025, suggests that the U.S. military has a potentially ongoing interest in controlling the weather. This weather control report is
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a 44-page chapter of the nearly 3,300-page Air Force 2025, a research project tasked by the Air Force chief of staff to identify the concepts, capabilities, and technologies the United States will require to remain the dominant air and space force in the 21st century. It states that the UN resolution has not halted the pursuit of weather-modification research but instead produced a primary focus on suppressive versus intensification activities. Owning the Weather proposed numerous applications for weather modification to subdue and manipulate enemy forces as well as to enhance offensive tactics in combat. The report describes weather modification as a high-risk, high-reward endeavor, offering a dilemma not unlike the splitting of the atom. If the militarys far-fetched dreams came true, weather control would have dangerously anti-democratic implications far beyond the battlefield. If rain and drought can be controlled and regulated, commodity market speculation on prices of wheat, corn, cotton, soy and many other crops can be further manipulated. This could have further effects on the price speculation of beef, pork, oils, and other products. If the weather can be modified, so too can water supplies, and with them, the basis for all life on earth. Look up, look around and look often. James Fleming asks, If, as history shows, fantasies of weather and climate control have chiefly served commercial and military interests, why should we expect the future to be different? At times, it seems difficult to expect a future at all. n

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Aprs Nous, le Dluge

by GERRY CANAVAN

From our stories, youd think we were ending the world

ANYONE WHO HAS studied creative writing has probably come across the pathetic fallacy, the prohibition against reflecting your characters emotional state in his or her surroundings. (Our hero, devastated by the breakup, walks home alone in the dark, as lightning cracks, and it begins to rain) The pathetic fallacy is strictly forbidden. Its cheap, even if it was good enough for Shakespeare; in these enlightened times we know how absolutely indifferent the world is to our feelings and our petty struggles. Indeed, the unflinching recognition of this indifference is arguably the defining characteristic of the modern age: We have physical mechanisms and automatic natural processes where earlier ages
25

had ritual sacrifice, angry gods, and sympathetic magic. All violent feelings have the same effect, writes John Ruskin, who coined the term pathetic fallacy in his 1856 Modern Painters; They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things. The truth, of course, is that the external world doesnt care if were happy or sad. It doesnt care about us at all. So when the mad king is deviled by the storm in Act III of King Lear, we call it plot contrivance. And when the Northeast is crushed by the second hundred-year-flood in two years, we call it a remarkable coincidence. And when scientists tell us that this sort of thing is going to keep happening more

GERRY CANAVAN

and more, as a direct result of ongoing human activity, we call it science fiction. Let the great gods / That keep this dreadful pudder oer our heads / Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch / That hast within thee undivulgd crimes / Unwhipped of justice. Thats fine for an old play, or some summer popcorn moviebut of course we know the world cant really take our sins and give them form. In the 19th century, when Ruskin was warning against such false impressions of external things, science fiction authors primarily reacted to the radical indifference of the natural world through an overarching mood of existential dread. In part this is attributable to the difference between Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment science: Where Enlightenment figures tended to explore the well-ordered regularity of nature, the postEnlightenment instead discovers natures fragility, its flux. The catastrophism and mass extinctions at the heart of Darwinian evolutionary theory, in particular, produce the unhappy possibility that this fate will some26

day be visited upon human life as welland the discovery of entropy, the propensity of all thermodynamic systems on all scales to run down over time, actually makes this final apocalypse a scientific certainty. Regardless of anything we say, do, think, or feel, someday the universe will grow cold, the stars will go out, and everything that has ever or will ever live will be long dead. Lumping science fiction, horror, and fantasy literatures into a single hybrid genre he calls fantastika, John Clute writes of how discoveries ranging from evolution and entropy (in the 19th century) to relativity, ecology, and quantum mechanics (in the 20th) have recast the human race not as the privileged children of God but rather a species clinging to a ball that may one day spin us off. This is what Clute calls the world storm: the unceasing, vertiginous pulse of a planetary history propelling us faster and faster towards inevitable final ruin. For Clute, horror is the most vital form of fantastika, because the feeling at fantastikas core is always precisely the horror of recognition: It is the task of modern horror to rend the veil of illusion, to awaken us. Horror (or Terror) is sight. . Horror (or Terror) is what happens when you find out the future is true. Which brings us back to the weather. People forget that H.G. Wellss War of the Worlds, published in 1898, is already a climate change story; the Martians invade Earth because their planet has already begun to grow cool while ours is still lush and warm. But the entropic disaster they face will be our fate, too; the climate crisis that threatens their civili-

APRES NOUS, LE DELUGE

zation is only an anticipatory version of the the same hopeless, frozen future portrayed secular cooling that must someday overtake in Henry Kirkhams The End of Time, G. our planet as well. This chilly vision of the Peyton Wertenbakers The Coming of the end of the worldechoing the cold twilight Ice, Amelia Long Reynoldss Omega, and of the earth in the farthest-flung future of many more besidesand this is just the ice Wellss own Time Machineis repeated in ages, before we even come to the planetary dozens of stories in the pulp era of science collisions, supernovae, superviruses, and exfiction. These are bleak attempts to resign tradimensional cosmic accidents that wipe ourselves to the indifference of the universe: out humanity in dozens more. an almost neurotic recitation of hyperbolic In this respect the mad, hopeless predicaspatial and temporal scales that dwarf the ment inaugurated by the development of the human lifetime and reduce us to a miniscule atom bomb comes as something of a perfootnote on a footnote on a footnote. In John verse relief; if nothing else, it returns to the W. Campbells brutally entropic Night, human race agency over its own destruction. from a 1935 issue of Astounding Stories, the In the famous final scene of 1968s Planet of word millions is repeated over and over the Apes we find Charleton Hestons astroagain on a single page, in a kind of obsessivenaut-hero, thousands of years in the future, compulsive rehearsal of cosmic scale: the discovering a half-sunk Statue of Liberty in million million million that had been born the desert: We finally really did it. You maniand lived and died in the countless ages beacs! You blew it up! Watching the film today fore I was born; a thousand billion years one thinks not of nuclear war but of climate before; the magnificent, proudly sprawling change. And what has happened, in fact, is exuniverse I had known, that flung itself across actly climate change: the implied nuclear war a million million light years, that flung radiant of Apes has transformed the biome, turning energy through space by the millions of milNew York City into a desert. As John Beck lions of tons wasgone. In Nat Schachners notes of the scene: Part of the disorientatAs the Sun Dies, published in the same ing effect [is] having the quintessential icon magazine that same year, the bleary-eyed of New York City planted in what is clearly a last survivors of the human race find themPacific environment. The West functions selves buried forever in the film as a vision under millions of tons of the post-catastrophe of ice, attached irresistEast: after the apocaThese are bleak ibly to a whirling, frozen lypse, New York will attempts to resign orb, doomed to circle look like Arizona and ourselves eternally around a small Californiathe East dim star through depthwill look like the West less space. One can find already looks: blasted,
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GERRY CANAVAN

inhospitable, and inhabited by the grotesque after-effects of a horrible but unfathomable history. In the sequel, unbelievably, things get even worse; an even more embittered Heston, mortally wounded and having lost everything, discovers an intact nuclear superweapon capable of destroying the entire planetand he decides to activate it. The planet explodes; everything dies; the franchise goes on for three more films. Our superweapons threatened to unpredictably detonate at any moment in the future, destroying all we have, and transforming the planet into a radioactive, desertified cinder. Thus the urgent need, expressed by so much leftist science fiction of the Cold War period, to oppose more bombs, more wars. But, as Timothy Morton has noted, the tem28

porality of climate change, the quintessential planetary apocalypse of our moment, is rather different: Global warming is like a very slow nuclear explosion that nobody even notices is happening. Thats the horrifying thing about it: its like my childhood nightmares came true, even before I was born. In the unhappy geological epoch of the Anthropocenethe name scientists have proposed for the moment human activities begin to be recognizable in the Earths geological record, the moment visiting aliens or the futures Cockroach sapiens will be able to see scrawled in their studies of ice cores and tree rings that humanity wuz herethe climate has always already been changed. The current, massive disruptions in global climate have been caused by the cumulative carbon release of

APRES NOUS, LE DELUGE

generations of people who were long dead and then airplanes begin to appear; cities before the problem was even identified, as grow huge. New instruments enter the musiwell as by ongoing release from the immense cal track: trumpets, trombones, saxophones; networks of energy, production, and disthe cacophony begins to speed. Now hutribution that were built and developed in mans are dwarfed not by nature but by the the open landscape of free and unrestricted ceaseless replication of their own consumer carbon releasethe networks on which goodsreplicating the logic of the assembly contemporary civilization now undeniably line, the screen becomes filled with countdepends, but which nobody yet has any idea less identical cars. We see jammed highways, how to replicate in the absence of carbonoverflowing landfills, smog-emitting power burning fossil fuels. Benjamin Kunkel said plants, flashes of war, riots, pollution, and it best: The nightmare, in good nightmare graves. The sequence goes on and on, using fashion, has something absurd and nearly invertical pans to give the sense of terrible acescapable about it: either we will begin runcumulation, of a pile climbing higher and ning out of oil, or we wont. That is: either higher. Finally we reach the endthe music we have Peak Oil, and the entire world sufslows back to its original piano score, comfers a tumultuous, uncontrolled transition to bined with an out-of-harmony synthesizer, post-cheap-oil economics, or else theres still over a few sepia-tinted images of that same plenty of fossil fuels left for us to permanentnatural world in ruin, filled with trash. The ly destroy the global climate through continend of the sequence locates this site of ruin ued excess carbon emissions. in the future; New York, 2022, population Few cultural documents depict this mo40,000,000. But of course these nightmarment of confrontation with ecological disasish images are all photographs from the films ter more vividly than the opening sequence present: the disaster had already happened, of the 1973 overpopulation disaster film even decades ago, it was already too late. Soylent Green, which depicts a miniature hisAs the narrative begins, we see the world tory of America. We begin with a quiet clasthis crisis has created. A loudspeaker ansical piano score over a sepia-tinted montage nouncing which fraction of the citys residepicting 19th century settlement of the dents will be allowed to use the streets for American West, in which the wide-open natthe next hour, while on the tiny TV in the ural spaces of the frontier seem to dwarf their apartment of (again!) Charlton Heston they human inhabitants. But announce that free conEven decades soon something begins sumer choice has been to change. Suddenly replaced with Soylent ago, it was there are too many peoGreen, which is a food already too late... ple in the frame, then far in such short supply that too many people; cars it can only be distrib29

GERRY CANAVAN

uted on Tuesdayscapitalisms free-market economy ultimately generating its dialectical opposite, central planning. One character explains why Soylent Green is necessary:
You know, when I was a kid, food was food! Until our scientists polluted the soil... decimated plant and animal life. Why, you could buy meat anywhere. Eggs, they had. Real butter. Fresh lettuce in the stores! How can anything survive in a climate like this? A heat wave all year long! The greenhouse effect! Everything is burning up!

The ad claims Soylent Green (looking like a bright green tofu cube) is a revolutionary foodstuff harvested from plankton from the oceans of the world, butas anyone who has ever heard of this film knowsthe true horror is that Soylent Green is really made of people. American consumerism is forced in the end to eat even itself. In contemporary ecological science fiction we find a sense that there is nothing left to do but somehow accommodate ourselves as best we can to ongoing and effectively permanent catastrophe. In Nausica of the Valley of the Wind, a widely loved ecological anime from Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, the eras of both green forests and global capitalism are in the distant past, lost in the mists of thousands of years. The legacy of a final war called the Seven Days of Fire is a snarl of toxic jungles and mutant insects, in the gaps of which scattered human beings still struggle to survive. Paolo Bacigalupis stories of the future see their quasi-human and non-human protagonists exploring pol30

luted landscapes in search of new types of beauty (if any are possible) in a world where unchecked capitalism has completely destabilized nature. In Daybreakers, a literally vampiric capitalism has run almost completely out of blood; in Avatar Earths last and only hope is magic rocks. And in John Brunners utterly apocalyptic The Sheep Look Uparguably the best of these texts, if only because it so unflinchingly shows us the worsteven this bare consolation is denied us as a parade of ever-worsening environmental horrors poisons every aspect of our lives, and yet nothing ever changes. The logical endpoint of such narratives generates again that final position on the spectrum of apocalyptic possibility: the Quiet Earth, a planet that is devoid of human life entirely. The negative charge of the Quiet Earth is the elegiac fantasy of an entirely dead planetnow, a murdered planetin which the human species has left behind nothing but death before finally killing even itself. We watch such shows for entertainment: Life After People, The World Without Us, Aftermath, The Future Is Wild. Both Terry Gilliams Twelve Monkeys and Margaret Atwoods Oryx and Crake see humanity deliberately murdered by mad scientists in the name of saving the rest of the planet before it is too late; in WALL-Ea movie marketed to children!the world capitalism makes is a total loss, best left for the cockroaches and the robots; These blighted visions of ruined, empty worlds recalland transformPercy Bysshe Shelleys 1818 poem Ozymandias as an anticipatory memory of Earths barren,

APRES NOUS, LE DELUGE

ruined future. In the desert of a distant land stands the toppled monument to the arrogant king of a lost civilization that believed both he and it to be immortal. But only the head and legs remain, half-sunk in the desert, like Apess Liberty; all else has turned to dust. The lone and level sands that round the decay of that colossal wreck, once the thriving cities and once-verdant landscapes of Ozymandiass empire, have been erased by totalizing desertification that, in the present moment, now inevitably suggests to us the bleak endpoint of global climate change. But of course, climate change is the total package, giving us not just deserts but all our fantastic imagined weather apocalypses simultaneously: floods for the coasts, deserts for the breadbaskets, wildfires for the forests, ice for a post-GulfStream Europe. Look upon our works, ye Pathetic Fallacy, and despair. Tell me again the external world doesnt notice us. When we contemplate ruins, Christopher Woodward has said, we contemplate
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our own future. The apocalypse is thereby transformed into a memory, an event which is yet to come but which has also somehow, paradoxically, already happened. Behind the endless, neurotic rehearsal of the debate over whether or not climate change is real lurks the much more depressed sense that it doesnt even matter either wayeven in the increasingly unlikely event theres time, we still wont act to save ourselves. Three months after Hurricane Sandy, eight years after Hurricane Katrina, 25 years after James Hansen testified before Congress, 40 years after the development of a scientific consensus around global warming in the 1970s, 70 years after climate models in the 1950s first began to point to the problem, 107 years after Svante Arrhenius first modeled the greenhouse effect in 1896, we still sit and wait to see what happens. Its as if weve been practicing the end of everything for so long were relieved, or even exhilarated, to see it finally become real. The market has spoken, and the media, and the voters: well continue to do nothing, eagerly surrender to our collective death drive, freely author our own collapse. Perhaps Lear would have thought it all a bit too on-the-nosebut now our suicidal urges and our selfishness and our sickening disregard for the future come back to us as hurricanes and heat-waves. Let a thousand science fictional panoramas bloom: the Statue of Liberty frozen over, toppled in the sand, neck-deep in water. Hollywood on fire. Texas cracked with drought. Hundred-year storms every other year. Aprs nous, la glace, le feu, le dsert, le dluge. n

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Climate Changed
by STEPHANIE BERNHARD

A warmed globe needs new writers to guide us through it

IT WOULDNT SURPRISE me a bit if, a decade or two from now, some prominent novelist or cultural tastemaker were to amend Virginia Woolf s iconic 1923 claim On or about December, 1910, human character changed to something like On or about November, 2012, the climate changed. Certainly near-future novelists will feature the relationship between humans and the environment more centrally than do most current writers. The seas are rising and the seasons are unraveling: It is inevitable that our fictional landscapes will evolve in tandem with our physical landscapes. Indeed, as our climate becomes ever less certain and more hostile, we might expect our fiction to start
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resembling the highly ironic, world-weary works that emerged from Woolf s war-stricken generation. Woolf s frankly arbitrary choice of late 1910 as the turning point in social history is most striking for its lack of connection to World War I, which erupted in July 1914. Her earlier date is linked most commonly to 1910s London art exhibit Manet and the Post-Impressionists, which introduced Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Picasso to the stodgy British and, presumably, knocked the aesthetics of Modernism into them. Exposure to new art, apparently, proved potent enough to alter character. My own prediction that November 2012 will be considered

CLIMATE CHANGED

a cultural milestone moment is more direct: Hurricane Sandy hit. Well, technically the storm touched down in October. But it was November before we began to comprehend the full extent of flooding damage; November before all the deaths were counted; November before power started to flicker back on in coastal communities; November before the New York City subway system shut down for only the second time in its century-long history began to run again. It was November when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg endorsed Obama for president on the grounds that the incumbent was more likely to take action in combating climate change, and November when Bloomberg started talking seriously about building a levee for the city. In November (and December), the Internet grew crowded with articles about the newly plausible demise of New York, and the graphics from Al Gores 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth depicting a submerged Manhattan started to seem less fantastical. In Woolf s era, as in ours, change was stirring long before the perceived moment of transformation. Modernist art and literature, for example, started to thrive on the European continent from the late 19th century on. In the 21st century, we have had plenty of warnings that climate change is occurring, and quickly. Months before Sandy began to form in the Caribbean, we knew that 2012 would go down as the hottest year recorded in American history. In March, thousands of daily-high temperatures were broken in a freak heat wave; over the summer, thousands
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more all-time high temperatures were broken in cities across the country. The plains parched in a massive drought, killing the countrys corn; the West burned in recordsetting fires, destroying some of its oldest trees. But even though it only affected the Northeast, no catastrophic weather event this year really turned our collective head until Sandy. Some boilerplate qualifying is probably necessary at this juncture: Yes, even those scientists who agree humans are causing the climate to change (namely, all of them) have generally refrained from attributing specific weather events to climate change. This cautious reserve is in the process of melting away, as climate scientists begin to analyze the likelihood of recent extreme weather events with or without the influence of human-induced climate change (hint: they are many times more likely to occur with this influence). Still, it is important to interpret current weather soberly and predict future weather calmly, despite all indications that we should panic and run for inland Canada.

Contemporary, pre-November 2012 fiction writers certainly approach climate change in their work with far more caution, reserve, and silence than do the scientists who are studying its future effects. This is less true of speculative novelists: Writers of science fiction and fantasy such as Margaret Atwood, Matthew

STEPHANIE BERNHARD

Sharpe, and James Howard Kunstler have been directing their energies toward an imagined climate apocalypse for some time. But non-speculative writers, who havent yet had access to actual apocalypse, tend to mention weather issues obliquely, as a tangent from their primary issues, or as one ingredient in the substrate that feeds a characters general sense of anxiety and unease. Consider, for example, the internal mutterings of Julius, narrator of Teju Coles acclaimed first novel, Open City

Open City is allotted far fewer words and therefore significance than issues whose psychic payoff is more immediate and whose urgency is more obvious. Julius, it seems, can resolve his sudden discomfort simply by going indoors. He is also horrified by people like me, who relentlessly attribute odd weather to climate change even after admitting scientific ignorance. After elaborating on his personal concerns, Julius explains that while he isnt the skeptic hed once been, he refuses to accept any jumping to conclusions either: Global I had my recurrent worry about warming was a fact, but that did not mean it how warm it had been all season was the explanation for why a given day was long. Although I did not enjoy the warm. It was careless thinking to draw the cold seasons at their most intense, link too easily, an invasion of fashionable I had come to agree that there politics into what should be the ironclad prewas a rightness about them, that cincts of science. there was a natural order in such Julius is narrating from 2006, when we had things. The absence of this order, the absence of cold when it ought somewhat less evidence of either the scito be cold, was something I now entific or the anecdotal variety that sympsensed as a sudden discomfort. toms of climate change were manifesting all around us. In the 2011 novel, climate change Weather-related thoughts recur a few times is still a debate, still an enigma, still a politiin Coles novel: Julius mentions his fears once cal fashion that might be worn to achieve a several pages before this passage and again certain effect but can be discarded just as easseveral chapters later. But weather is just ily. It is still a secondary or tertiary concern one of many worries that causes him disthat neednt be attended to until further nocomfort, alongside history, family, friends, tice. Julius fears that by noticing November psychiatric patients, New Yorks (non-cliwarmth (for the night narrated is in Novemmate-centric) fuber) he is himself becoming ture, bedbugs, and, what he calls a climate overWriters tend to of course, mortalinterpreter, a careless thinkmention weather ity. As in American er ignorant of science. issues obliquely and global politics, It might have been easy climate change in enough, in 2006, to over35

CLIMATE CHANGED

interpret weather events in the temperate continental United States, but in some parts of the world the manifestations of climate change had already slipped from overinterpreted to overdetermined. Such is the case in Alexis M. Smiths slender debut novel Glaciers, in which protagonist Isabels yearning for a connection to the past via vintage objects finds a parallel in the slow death of the eponymous glaciers she loved as a child. The novel itself is set in Portland, Oregon, but takes frequent remembered trips back to the Alaska of Isabels childhood. Early on in the narrative, for example, Isabel imagines a late20th-century ferry crossing from Washington State to Alaska. What she feels should be a funereal sight is for most passengers merely a spectacle: The ferry slowed where a massive glacier met the ocean; a long, low cracking announced the rupture of ice from glacier; then came the slow lunge of the ice into the sea. There were shouts of appreciation and fear, but nothing like grief, not even ordinary sadness. The sudden discomfort of Coles Julius is here inflicted on the glacier, providing onlookers a concrete piece of evidence on the effects of climate change. Rather than simply feeling warmer air (feeling that least recordable, least reproducible of the senses), the people one the boat can hear the long, low cracking of climate change, can see its slow lunge, can corroborate each others accounts of the event. They have the material to tell a story about the present-day reality of the phenomenon. But the ferry-goers underinterpret the event they witness: they
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experience the calving without relating it to long-term human-induced climate change. The narrator is forced to step in to remind us that we are experiencing a death. But Isabels melancholic nostalgia is as thinly spread as Juliuss highbrow nervousness: She is as likely to apply it to a vintage apron or an old postcard as to a dying glacier. The day of her life that shapes the novel is full of tea and her library work and vintage dresses and a tall/dark/silent love interest; the plight of the glaciers necessarily pales in comparison to the micro-dramas of quotid-

STEPHANIE BERNHARD

ian existence. Indeed, Isabel makes a conscious effort to avoid thinking about climate change. We learn that her father, a frustrated musician, worked in Alaskas oilfields and was injured there. By employing her character in this ecologically-charged trade, Smith seems to be saying that we humans are all implicated, all a part of this environmental mess. Isabels response to the enormity of the problem is conscious blindness: Isabel cannot read magazine articles or books about the North. She cannot watch the nature programs about the migrations of birds and mammals dwindling, the sea ice thinning, and the erosion of the islands. How can this young woman, whose livelihood has her mending abused library books all day, turn her back on an abused ecosystem? The obvious answer is that she is too sensitive to cope with reality and therefore chooses to ignore it. The decline of the Arctic exists on the same plane of emotional importance as the sad fate of her great-grandmothers house. The point, in this context, is not that Isabel fails as a character because she neglects to sign up for the next Keystone pipeline protest. The failures are of the world around her: She still inhabits a moment in which it is possible to ignore climate change in day-to-day life. On or about November, 2012, that world vanished.

Woolf s choice to place her turning-point moment three and a half years before World
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War I, surely the event that shocked the European psyche into modernity more suddenly and effectively than any other, perhaps indicates a belief that human character would have changed dramatically even if there had been no war. And perhaps our future novelist will be asked why he or she lets just go with he selected November 2012 as the tipping point in climate history, when Hurricane Sandy killed only a measly couple hundred people, and not, say, the European heat wave of 2003 (approx. 70,000 dead), or Katrina in 2005 (approx. 1800 dead), or perhaps oh, I dont know the North American heat wave of 2016 (approx. 200,000 dead; Phoenix abandoned) or Hurricane Henry in 2019 (approx. 3500 dead, Virginia Beach abandoned). Our novelist will have to admit that he is from the East Coast of the United States, perhaps even lived in New York for a time. His choice, like Woolf s, is personal. Perhaps hell say he wants to correct the visions that pre-2012 novelists presented of New York Citys future. In Super Sad True Love Story, for example, Gary Shteyngart paints a bleak picture of a city whose culture has dissipated and power faded, but whose primary threats are Chinese money and the U.S. government, not its own waterways. Sure, the feckless narrator, Lenny, has to deal with stifling June heat, but his autumn is appropriately blustery and the Staten Island Ferry is functioning without weather interruptions. Or maybe our novelist will refer to the nearfuture finale of Jennifer Egans Pulitzer-prize

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winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, outnumbered bankers and lawyers in busiwhich takes a more direct stab at New York ness suits, and everything smelled like dirty and climate change. In Egans future universe, water. mysterious warming-related adjustments And what about the even-more-destructo Earths orbit had shortened winter days; tive hurricanes that followed Sandy? a February day was unseasonably warm: Our future novelist doesnt really write like eighty-nine degrees and dry; and the trees, Egan or Shteyngart, nor like Smith or Cole. which had bloomed in January, were now in His technique has much more in common tentative leaf. All good so far; all apocalypwith Hemingways, or Eliots, or any number tic enough (or realistic enough, our novelist of younger writers who emerged from the might say, terrifyingly) to set the tone Egan Great War alive and hungry for literary recogwants. nition, Woolf among them. Human characBut Egan couldnt have known how cliter might have changed in 1910, but Woolf s mate change would affect Lower Manhattan writing style didnt change until World War I in 2012, and her portrayal of the neighborended: Her two prewar novels are prim and hood unfortunately destroys the novels illutraditional; her first postwar novel, Jacobs sion of reality for our novelist. She sets her Room, marks the beginning of her decadesFebruary concert, the climax of the novel, in long experiment with literary form. This nov2020s Lower Manhattan, choosing the locael does something quintessentially postwar: tion presumably to evoke 9/11 and thereby It writes all the way around Jacob, the title tap into Americas cultural memory. Indeed, character who is doomed to die on a World for her character Alex the weight of what War I battlefield, and all the way around had happened here more than twenty years World War I, without ever actually writing ago was still faintly present, detectable as them. Woolf s winding sentences have little a sound just out of earshot, the vibration obviously in common with Hemingways faof an old disturbance. But what about the mously clipped specimens, but Hemingway Lower Manhattan disturbances caused would soon employ a similar technique in by Hurricane Sandy writing about war: supten years before Alexs plying only the sparest 2020s visit, our novelist details and allowing the Literature will wants to know? Much reader to fill in the rest. bear the burden of this concrete jungle Woolf and Hemingof witnessing our still lacked power for way could omit key deweeks after the storm, tails because a critical cultural response to and much of its retail remass of their readers climate change mained closed, and city had all suffered through construction workers far the same hardships: the
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STEPHANIE BERNHARD

fear and loss inherent in any war, the horror and despair inherent in witnessing the war that mechanized mass slaughter. A seemingly harmless word or phrase in their fiction Woolf s Jacob shares the surname Flanders with the infamously bloody battles, for example could evoke a torrent of understanding from contemporaneous readers. Modernity and its potential for infinite destruction (a potential to be tested severely in 20th century warfare) had taken hold. There was no reverting to prewar ignorance. The future novelist has access to a similar collective suffering, one whose foundation isnt all that different from the one that formed in the last century. As weather disasters increase in frequency and severity, an ever higher percentage of the global human population will experience life-threatening weather conditions, will lose homes and livelihoods, will lose family and friends to climate. Gradually, we as a species will lose faith in the Earths ability to support our civilizations and lives. The world will start to look as hideous and hopeless as it did to Eliot in 1922 when he wrote The Waste Land, and many parts of the world will truly be that parched or drenched. When words like hurricane and flood and fire and drought have turned hot enough to burn anyone who hears them hot as the word war was in 1922 well need novelists to navigate around and through them with an ironic detachment reminiscent of Modernist fiction. Well need novelists to show us, in other words, how we respond to a world rapidly becoming even
39

less certain and stable than it already had been. This all sounds rather grim. Id prefer to end on a note of hope, but there is no denying that the changing climate is going to make all of our lives harder and less predictable over the coming decades. Just as there was no un-inventing the machine gun, there is no un-polluting the atmosphere at least not in such a way that the people of this generation and the next couple dozen wont be affected. Literature will bear the burden of witnessing and processing our cultural response to the ravages of climate change, and these ravages will soon be ubiquitous enough that novelists will make them a central concern. Works that forefront climate change are just now emerging in the American mainstream. This summers gorgeous film Beasts of the Southern Wild is one example; Barbara Kingsolvers just-released novel Flight Behavior is another. Many more examples will follow. It will become impossible for non-speculative novels to ignore climate change because dramatic weather events will necessarily affect their characters lives. It will even become difficult for novels to ignore climate for a hundred pages at a leap, like Coles and Smiths. As our experience of climate change proceeds from scientific observation and prediction to the lived reality of frequent weather disasters, climate literature of the future will look increasingly like war literature from the past. Its central concern will be so obvious and so painfully known to readers that it will hardly need to be named. n

40

Humid, All Too Humid

by COSMO BJORKENHEIM and A.M. GITTLITZ

On the meteorology of morals

When a real storm cloud thunders above him, [The Rational Man] wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he walks from beneath it. Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense IN PRE-ENLIGHTENMENT Europe, only God had the power to transform the world; then, we learned, it was Man. In the last 10 years, the global consciousness has shifted once again: now the Earth itself is the agent of global change. Humanity, with its arsenal of nuclear weapons and ready-to-revolt workers has been stripped of its power and now sits as a helpless spectator, alongside
41

God, to the big-budget disaster flick that is the contemporary news cycle. This nightmare was not how this century was to proceedwe were set for a different one. Spectacular terrorism was to be our daily affirmation of helplessness. How little we expected that our planet itself would be a far more bloodthirsty bin Ladeneven more irrational and unforgiving than that dark wizard of the caves. It was as if, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the cabalistic Bush administration were recast as adventurers in some overly ambitious cartoon with the twist ending that they were after the wrong villain all alongit was our beloved Mother Earth, angered by decades of unabated in-

HUMID, ALL TOO HUMID

dustry, who sought vengeance on us hubrissmiling dads charbroiling ribs in a poured tic mortals in Lovecraftian reckoning. concrete foxhole 35 feet below the lawn. The How do we proceed now that we are at the prospect of chaos is a fantastic resource both mercy of this unbeatable foe? Are we to take for the legitimacy of the state and for private hippie pseudo-scientists and Greenpeace enterprise. The label disaster industry has activists as our new cultural prophets? Why, already been applied to humanitarian agenafter all, should we sneer at the forwardcies and relief organizations that address thinking strategies of green energy, carbon famines as natural phenomena rather than as offsets, and the reduction of individual footelements of political and economic strategy. prints, when we old radicals have no better After all, from the perspective of enterprise. solution for the undeniable impending blow what does a famine represent but a massive of Gaias hammer? Maybe a better question demand to be met with a massive supply? to ask ourselves is not how much disaster we The narrative that pits humanity as such should endure, but how these disasters have against an immense and obscure antagonist been folded into myths that justify the obediseems all too familiar. The weather has beence of humanity. come a stand-in for the nation-states essenHurricane Sandy was described as a tial enactment of the friend/enemy distincthreat, a challenge, and a lesson. The tion. Its army of science bureaucrats is hard primary affects occasioned by it were anxiety at work justifying how we ought to combat and irritation, because the spectacular news our foe: appeasement, or heavier attack. media told us to expect inconvenience, frusThe meteorological-industrial complex sees tration, and discomfort from the high winds profits in longer summers and a newfound and rain. You may not need a weatherman shipping route through the arctic, while the to know which way the wind blows, but you Green left sniffs electoral potential in withmight need one to tell you that it sucks. drawing troops from the theaters of ecologiA Big Storm Requires Big Government, cal destruction, only to redeploy them as headlined an op-ed piece in the New York eco-peacekeepers. Worse still, these seem to Times from October 29, celebrating FEMA be our only choiceseven the Green moveagainst Romneys campaign trail exhortaments Bakunin, Derrick Jensen, favors worktions to privatize disaster relief. Yet there is ing within this dynamic (going so far as to already no shortage of deluxe survival kits form an alliance with the FBI) in order to and premium family preserve the sanctity of cooking kits whose adsalmon runs. Whose side vertisements read like We are in danger, was Hurricane unwitting parodies of to be sure, but science Sandy on? 1950s nuclear holocaust and new-age theolodomestic idylls, with gies will do us no good.
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COSMO BJORKENHEIM AND A.M. GITTLITZ

As Nietzsche puts it in Human, All too Human: Even if existence of [the Metaphysical World] were never so well demonstrated, it is certain that knowledge of it would be most useless of all knowledge: more useless even than knowledge of the chemical composition of water must be to the sailor in danger of a shipwreck. (HTH 9) It is not, after all, the damage that has been done to atmospheric layers, nor the glaciers and their bears that should concern us when the wards of New Orleans or the Rockaways are flooded and the army is dispatched to protect the surviving commoditiesit is the sum of our practices themselves, our bloody history of always thrusting the poor and working classes to the fore of every battle. In this case the front is a battle against ecological restriction, and the trenches are lowlying coastal areas. Are we big-hearted consumers prepared to separate our recyclables, reduce our carbon footprint, and take shorter showers for the war effort? Are we prepared for 150,000,000 to die in Bangladesh when we let the water run a moment too long? Ah, it will be a tragedy, but at least the guilt that results from it will be equally distributed among all us selfish consumers. Who were we to fabricate plastic and burn the Jurassics cadavers? The third world is a mass grave we all dig with each soft drink we suck dry. But this war propaganda is already wearing thin. How was it, again, that the equally devastating Tsunamis and Earthquakes in Japan, Thailand, Chile, Pakistan, Haiti, etc. were the result of global warming? Only pseudoscientists have answers, which are about as com43

pelling as religious fanaticism. And those condemned Bangladeshis, how could they be so foolish as to not attempt an escape from their shallow prison? The gigantic wall at the border with India provides a ready answer. Is it really the Ozone we need to repair, or the system of policymakers and their armies who would gladly condemn 150,000,000 to death rather than risk an ethnic or economic crisis in their borderlands? There is a black cloud hovering over civilization, but it was not created by a secret government satellite, rogue industrialism, or a vengeful forest spirit. It is a sense of helplessness against our own impulse to reproduce a community of death that has rotated through varying degrees of catastrophe since its inception. The machine begins, the victims take their places, and all avenues of retreat are closed. The apocalypse is inevitable every two-bit mystic, environmentalist, or political radical agrees. It is as though we were trapped in that Twilight Zone future where the sun is heating up and melting the worlda future, we discover, dreamt by a woman in a sunless post-apocalypse. In what does this dream really consist? What does it mean to complain about the paralyzing heat? To feel indignant toward the chill that numbs our fingers? It means, simply, to say no to the world. The affinity between this pessimism and all apocalyptic narratives (of the melting polar ice caps, the Texas-sized asteroid, or the collapse of global capital) is in their stripping us of political agency. The Trotskyist who waits for the unified proletariat to seize the government ap-

HUMID, ALL TOO HUMID

paratus and the Christian who waits for the second coming are both doomed to political impotence. Is there a climactic heaven on earth purged of the original sin of largescale industry? The Anthropocene becomes a world to be wished away, and nature is not the adversary but rather the force that guarantees this development, like God and historical necessity before it. While the climate can be a fantastic antipolitical force that necessitates the maximum of worldwide technocratic governance, the weather also reveals other social contradictions. What does an ice storm look like? In the penthouse, a cozy bourgeois afternoon with hot cider, scented candles, terrycloth robes, and a Netflix subscription. Twelve floors below, a wanderers frozen hair and scant shelter under scaffolding thats ready to collapse. The air in the penthouse feels heavy with a lingering Christian empathy, seasoning every scone-bite with a dash of guilt. But
44

relativism comes to the rescue, free-market freedom-of-choice its cavalry: comfort can be confinement and freezing can be freedom, depending on your vantage point. We all choose our own lifestyleswho am I to judge someone elses choices? The guilt that might accompany an awareness of ones class privilege is treated by changing not the material conditions, but simply ones attitude to them. Any impulse toward community is pushed aside by the neoliberal norm of man as an enterpriseone invests in it, one develops it, and if it fails, thats a risk one took. Political resignation in the face of cosmic disaster, and the search for universal norms in economic rationality: these twin threats move to the foreground with extreme weather phenomena. During the blackout caused by Hurricane Sandy, grocery stores hiking up the prices of candles and batteries was cynically attributed to the exigencies of enterprise: Theyve got to make a buck, wouldnt

COSMO BJORKENHEIM AND A.M. GITTLITZ

you do the same thing? Meanwhile, The American Security Project responded to the storm with fears that the effects of climate change on infrastructure will not only be costly to our nations economy, they will also make us less secure as a nation. Here it seems that mass-industry and the global security regime are pitted against each other, making many wonder if its tendency to throw the climate into disequilibrium contains capitalisms negation. But isnt it more likely that climate change is one of capitalisms internal limits, the ones it continually proliferates while including them in its infinitely expanding axiomatic? Just as reusable shopping bags and water bottles fought one excess of capitalism by introducing another, so do renewable energy solutions. While its true that China increased its wind electricity generation a hundredfold over the past ten years, it is also currently building 26 new nuclear power plants. A possibly auspicious result of this contradictory tendency is that the disastrous effects of expanding large-scale industry might directly undermine the techniques of surveillance that serve capital. During the blackout caused by Sandys swells, almost all security technology below 39th street was incapacitated for several days. Surveillance cameras and alarm systems were offline, and the luxury boutiques, bourgeois penthouses, and gourmet groceries were defenseless, save for the restless searchlights mounted on the patrol cars of New Yorks Swinest. Instead of celebrating the temporary disappearance of all hindrances to the satisfaction of their
45

material desires in a feast of unproductive consumption, the masses found themselves in a double bind. With the power out and the smartphones dumbed everything was permitted, so nothing was possible. The timid reaction to Superstorm Sandy reveals the conservative attitude that constitutes obsessive-compulsive bourgeois subjectivity; fears of intrusion and the interruption of routine paralyzes the population, and the sight of comatose flatscreens gives condo-dwellers post-traumatic stress disorder. The only nominally revolutionary response from the organized left, which now calls itself Occupy, is to fill in where the State fails. They clean up, aid survivors, and ultimately aim to get devastated areas back to the point where stores and schools can reopen and people can get back to work. The work is admirable, and it goes without saying that this is what any human does for a neighbor. But how impossibly far is this response from one that rebuilds the capacity of neighborhood survival without rebuilding the schools and workplaces? When will we allow ourselves to be truly devastated? Sandy was the figure of an unreachable object of desirea vengeful goddess out to destroy the security apparatus and the most dispossessed rabble alike. What are we to make of this? What did she want, and whose side was she really on? The trick may be to resist this hermeneutic temptation, and ask ourselves instead: What do we want? Nature is not the subject of history any more than God or the self-realizing Spirit, but then again, who is? n

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Not for Prophet

by AMANDA SHAPIRO

Whos mad about The Weather Channels original programming?

AS SANDY CHURNED toward Atlantic City on Oct. 29, 2012, The Weather Channel was having a very good day. For a few hours in the early morning, TWC was the most-watched channel on cable: over 2 million people tuned inmore than CNN or Fox Newsto tune into the whereabouts of the superstorm/frankenstorm/post-tropical noreaster. The network, which is owned by NBC, took its good fortune in stride. In a press release the next day, TWC chairman and CEO David Kenny said, People had an immediate need for information about Sandy. We were just happy they came to us for it. Weather events like Sandy might be the only times anyone has an immediate need
47

for The Weather Channel these days, and even then, its a strong claim. Most people1 dont think about the channel much at all, even as theyre using weather.comTWCs online armor its self-titled mobile app. My own impression of the channel was that it was a relic, rarely spotted except for on the offcolor, wall-mounted screens of retirement homes and Laundromats. But, as it turns out, TWC the channel has a regular audience of hardcore fans. And, among those people, the consensus is that something has gone terri1. And when I say, Most people, I mean the people who matter to media outlets, i.e., 25-54-year-olds weans to own a laptop and a smartphone and maybe some other type of smart device.

NOT FOR PROPHET

bly, terribly wrong. Take former TWC fan PitLoad413 (his Yahoo username): What has happened to the Weather Channel...my Weather Channel? Huh? Where the hell is it? Like an stereotypical 85-yearold man in his den, I would watch the forcasts and listen to the music for hours on end. Believe it or not I enjoyed seeing the temperatures change and ponder whether or not a snowstorm is coming our wayNow, we have our fellow Storm Trackers and Weather Geeks replaced by the snotty-voiced dumb broads with fake tits and metrosexual pretty boys with fake tans one would find on the otherwise less-sophisticated 24-hour news networksWho thought that this would be a good idea to turn my Weather Channel into another dumb McNews channel? PitLoad is apoplectic, and hes not alone. TWC has become a politically correct Anthropogenic Global Warming infotainment blizzard of chatty b.s. which has shouldered out the channels former comprehensive, useful, helpful hard weather data, writes Jordynne L. And from Adam L., I no longer watch TWC because they made all these annoying & aggravating changes. I wish it was like it was back in the early 80s. And from an anonymous commenter: I was 8 when I started watching, and I have tapes of the weather channel, and cry when I watch them. What struck me first was the sense of personal betrayal in their tones. It spoke to a
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relationship much deeper than I thought was possible with a cable network whose mostwatched program is called Local on the 8s.2 TWC has had its share of devotees since it began broadcasting in 1982. These people are what I came to think of as The Base. They have favorite OCMs (on-camera meteorologists) from decades past. They recall major weather events like 1988s Hurricane Gilbert and the east coast Superstorm of 93. They share video clips from TWCs Major Meltdown of 08, which happened for one night Jan. 21-22 and involved a power surge, followed by the local forecast playing on continuous loop. With fondness, they recall the late-90s commercials featuring a fictional bar called The Frontwhere face-painted diehards watched TWC as if it were footballand the slogan Weather Fans, Youre Not Alone.3 They keep the channel on while they sleep. They are local meteorologists, storm chasers, armchair forecasters. Among them, theres a sizeable subset devoted to geeking out over the tech specs of the various generations of WeatherStar/In2. I have no real evidence to support a claim that Local on the 8s is actually TWCs most popular show (and, to be clear, its not a show so much as a recurring minute-to-two-minute-long local weather report, beamed to your TV by a Lucasfilm-era computer called a WeatherStar or its higher-tech offspring, IntelliStar.) But just about everyone I talked to about TWC outside members of The Base brought up Local on the 8s, albeit with all kinds of bastardizations of the name (Weather on the 8s, Local on the 2s, 8 Minute Forecast, and so on.). 3. The Base loves to compare past TWC slogans, which have run the gamut in its thirty-year history, from the unsettling We Take The Weather Seriously, But Not Ourselves to the uncomfortably beseeching You Need Us For Everything You Do.

AMANDA SHAPIRO

telliStar systems, which receive and process forecast and weather information. The only competing subset, in terms of forum-posting frequency and general vim, is the TWC music aficionados, who log and share virtually every song played on the channel.4 Its mindboggling, really, how large and vocal these two subsets are, considering that both the WeatherStar/IntelliStar systems and the music are only ever used for Local on the 8s (See footnote 2). Most of The Base agrees that TWCs heyday was in the mid-to-late 90s. 1995 seemed to be a particularly stellar year. Two live shows, Weatherscope and Exposures debuted. I would know everything about the nations weather and the forecast in a nutshell after watching one segment of WeatherScope, writes TWC fan-site administrator phw115wvwx, who purports to be a 30-yearold man from Blacksburg VA. And the Exposures series taught me so much about the weather yet only aired once a week for 30 minutes, he adds. Fans generally agree that TWC declined
4. There are dissertations to be written about TWC music, which, to casual viewers, might be considered the single best exemplar of the elevator genre. Here are a few entry points: a) TWCs label, The Weather Channel Music, has released close to a dozen compilations of Local on the 8s songs. b) The Weather Channel Presents: The Best of Smooth Jazz peaked at #1 on Billboards Top Contemporary Jazz charts. c) TWC caused a minor fracas among fans in 2007 when it started airing tracks with vocals. d) There is no artist more closely associated with TWC than Trammell Starks, who wrote 39 instrumental tracks for the channel in the mid-90s (titles include 50 Below, After the Rain, The Blizzard Song, and Unpredictable). The WeatherStar/IntelliStar system still defaults to an all-Starks playlist whenever anything goes wrong. 49

steadily through the early aughts until 2008, when it took a nosedive off a cliff. 2008 was the year Landmark, TWCs original parent company, sold the channel to NBC for $3.5 million. A number of beloved OCMs were canned, Weatherscope and Exposures were dropped, and the slogan was changed to the universally-derided The Weather Has Never Looked Better. Then TWC started showing weatherrelated movies like Deep Blue Sea, which is about mutant sharks and stars Samuel L. Jackson and LL Cool J. Misery, a Stephen King adaptation in which there is a snowstorm, is another TWC favorite. During one such screening, TWC didnt cut to live coverage of a tornado, and the uproar from both fans and casual viewers was deafening.5 TWC abandoned the films in 2010 and has now been moving further into what it calls original programmingor, as the The Base would have it, weather-tainment, the National Enquirer for Weather, and even weather propaganda. There are about 20 shows on TWC now that probably fall into this category. Theyre all reality shows about people doing dangerous things in bad weather situationson icebergs, during hurricanes, tornadoes, etc.or about weather doing bad things to innocent people. One show is called Weather Caught on Camera and is basically an assemblage of YouTube clips filled in with eyewitness interviews and ex5. The film on air on Apr. 30, 2010, when a tornado struck Scotland, Arkansas was called Wind. It stars Matthew Modine and Jennifer Grey and is about yachting.

NOT FOR PROPHET

pert analysis.6 Another is called Lifeguard! is exactly what it sounds like. They are all lowbudget and, for the most part, unwatchable. Some of TWCs decisions have admittedly been in poor taste. But are such changes to a commercial channels programming really all that unforeseen? TWC is doing what every normal media-outlet does, i.e., its trying to entice viewers.7 The problem is, TWCs audience adamantly does not want to be enticed. They sold the channel and now theyre desperate to evolve when all theyre good at and all people want them to do is present the weather with some insight, writes Facebook user csh1. I am a weather guy, and I like watching the weather broadcasts, writes a forum user named Trav. Not storm stories, not cantore stories,8 not impact tv, and all the other shows they have on there now. Just do your job with forecasting THE WEATHER. Reporting THE WEATHER, write Anonymous. What I began to understand about The Base was that many of them are in denial about The Weather Channel being a commercial operation. They see it as a public service with a mission, and that mission, in their
6. The expert analysis in the case of the Helsinki cloud comes from TWCs severe weather guru Dr. Greg Forbes. Right on the beach its not very windy, the pine trees are not swaying at all, but now the birds are beginning to stir around... Its backed by a frenetic drumbeat and sound effects of shattering glass. 7. For instance, The Times pointed out rather cheekily that all of TWCs OCMs during Hurricane Sandy wore dress shirts with the sleeves rolled up and loosened ties, presumably to make its coverage seem more intense. Sure enough, the night Sandy made landfall, TWC had its third-highest viewership in history. Its unclear whether the business-casual effect was a factor here. 50

minds, has nothing to do with ratings. This perception is patently wrong, of course - this is, after all, cable television were talking about but where does it come from? The roots of our beliefs about weather forecastswhat theyre worth and who we trust to provide themcan be traced to magic, mysticism, and the supernatural. Predictions are essentially prophecies, and prophecies about the weather are as old as Genesis. Noah knew 100 years before the rains arrived, Moses gave a ten-plague forecast to Pharaoh, and Ezekiel predicted the kind of extreme weather The Weather Channel only wishes it could cover. Forecasting was an easier job back then; God did not beat around the bush. But it was also a sacred duty and a selfless act. And perhaps it should be. The weather is perhaps the closest thing we have to a truly universal experience, not just because its the go-to subject for polite conversationalists worldwide. To risk sounding like a TWC promo, weather can be as powerful as an economic crisis and as deadly as disease or war. The only way to control it is to predict it, and we cant even do that very well. Theres also the question of quality. There are few professions in which being wrong is a daily if not hourly experience, but most weather forecasters are inaccurate the vast majority of the time. Thats because meteorol8. csh1 is referring to Cantore Stories, a half-hour show during which meteorologist Jim Cantore travels to places with extreme weather that are also beautiful. Its one of the more popular new TWC shows, and some of the episodes are definitely watchable and even kind of good.

AMANDA SHAPIRO

ogy is a science based literally on chaos. The father of chaos theory was a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz whose breakthrough came while he was trying, unsuccessfully, to predict the weather with a computer model. He found that small variations in initial inputs (temperatures, wind speeds, barometric pressures) were leading to wildly divergent results. In other words, The Butterfly Effect. So if weather forecasters are our modernday prophets, they are also students of an imperfect science. In TWCs case, theyre business-people too, and this creates all kinds of uncomfortable ethical problems. For instance, TWC has admitted that most commercial forecasters inflate the percentage-chance of rain because its better for business (people dont notice if expected showers never come, but they get cranky if it rains when it isnt supposed to). As Bruce Rose, former TWC VP, admitted in The New York Times, If the forecast was objective, if it has zero bias in precipitation, wed probably be in trouble. But TWC is already in trouble with its followers, and it has been for a while. The last straw for The Base came in early November when a Noreaster trundled toward New York less than a week after Hurricane Sandy. TWC announced on its website that it would call the stormand certain subsequent stormsby name, much like the system for naming hurricanes determined by a United Nations-affiliated group. TWC would call the first storm Athena. According to a press release, a group of senior meteorologists came up with an A-to-Z list of names, though
51

it was more likely a crack legal team. R is for Rockya single mountain in the Rockies, Y is for Yogipeople who do yoga, and Q is for, uh, QThe Broadway express subway line in New York City. Thousands of people reacted to the news on Facebook, TWCs website, and other comment forums with varying levels of derision. Name overload, wrote one commenter. These names for everything are way over the top, wrote another. Too big for your britches. Just cover the weather, dont make up names for it. a totally rogue action. I hope the NWS has the authority to force a stop to this disgusting behavior.9 The National Weather Service did, in fact, issue its own press release just hours later, forbidding its staff meteorologists from using the name in its products, i.e., its forecasts, warnings, alerts, etc. TWC was unfazed. It cheerfully listed the reasons for its decision in a five-point plan that was actually a two-point plan with a few points rephrased, and concluded, The question then begs to ask Why arent winter storms named?...It might even be fun and entertaining. TWCs indefatigable optimism is hardly surprising. After all, unflappability amid chaos is the channels modus operandi. Proverbial shit-storms sit squarely in its comfort zone. n
9. For the uninitiated, NWS is the National Weather Service, a government agency under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that puts out its own forecasts on its website, weather.gov. It does not have a TV channel, but if it did it would be the rational alternative for people fed up with the for-profit shenanigans of TWC (CSPAN for weather?).

To the Squirrels
By JEFF SPARROW

Glenn Beck tells us one weve heard before

Glenn Beck (with Harriet Parke) Agenda 21 Threshold Editions, 2012, 304 pages

PRAISE THE SQUIRRELS. Praise those who feed the squirrels. So chants the ecofascist dictatorship that controls America in Glenn Becks fascinating new novel Agenda 21. With its black-garbed Enforcers, its nourishment cubes and power-generating energy mats, Agenda 21 reads like boilerplate pulp. Yet wed be mistaken to class it as science fiction. Rather, the book represents a generic mutation akin to the evolution Thomas Frank documents in Whats the Matter with Kansas?: the strange transformation of rural populism from a mass movement of the radical left to a tendency of the extreme right. In an afterword, Beck explains how Agenda 21 should be used. The book, he says, will awaken its readers to the existential threat posed by the real life Agenda 21, a tepid United Nations program forgasp!sustainable development. They should then pass the book on to friends but without mentioning its politics. Dont tell them about the Afterword, he urges. Dont even tell them that Agenda 21 is a real initiative. Let them go through the discovery process themselves. In other words, Beck sees Agenda 21 less as literary text than political intervention. Hes adopting a novelistic mode quite foreign to todays left (which has, by and large,
52

JEFF SPARROW

abandoned any direct relationship between activism and authorship) but instantly recognizable to progressive novelists of original populist era. Consider Ignatius Donnellys 1890 bestselling Caesars Column, a key text in the late 19th century boom of literary utopias and dystopias. Believing, as I do, that I read the future aright, Donnelly announces, in a very Beckian introduction, it would be criminal of me to remain silent. His book duly describes the depredations of a futuristic New York, not to titillate curiosity about tomorrow but to spur action today. Which was precisely what it did. Donnelly also composed the 1892 preamble for the Omaha Platform of the Peoples Party,
53

whose presidential candidate that year received more than a million votes on a program very similar to that espoused in his novel. The similarities between Caesars Column and Agenda 21 extend beyond their agitational aspirations. In one of the how-it-allhappened info dumps so characteristic of the genre, the mother of Becks protagonist, Emmeline, explains the rise of the oppressive Republic. A new law started on the East Coast, she says, because thats where laws were made. They gave it a fancy sounding name. Agenda 21. New laws, the East Coast, fancy sounding names: the tropes are now so deeply associated with the conspiratorial right that the dystopian script writes itself.

TO THE SQUIRRELS

Yet Donnellys book reminds that imagery of decent plain folk trampled upon by snooty East Coasters belonged originally to the populist left, not the right. In Caesars Column, our hero, one Gabriel Weltstein, discovers that New York boasts public booths in which would-be suicides can conveniently organize their own deaths. The authorities assert that it is a marked improvement over the old fashioned methods, the outraged Weltstein writes to his brother back home, but to my mind it is a shocking combination of impiety and mockphilanthropy. If today it goes without saying that a rural outsider appalled by big-city death panels would be a conservative, back then it was equally obvious hed be a reformer aghast at an irreligious money power. Theres even a precedent for Becks conspiratorial paranoia. Yes, the identification of an asinine environmental program as an existential threat to America might reinforce the perception of an author nutty as the rodents his characters worship. But a certain rhetorical excess comes with the territory; Donnellys first bestseller explored the fate of the lost city of Atlantis, while he later developed some extravagant theories about the real authorship of Shakespeares plays. Populism, whether Left or Right, identifies a fairly amorphous people against an equally ill-defined elite, and the unanswered question as to exactly how the latter retains its dominance over the former provides fertile ground for paranoiac flourishes. A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents, and it is rapidly taking possession of the world. If not met and overthrown at once it forebodes terrible social
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convulsions, the destruction of civilization, or the establishment of an absolute despotism. If you shut your eyes, you could imagine that passage (from Donnellys Omaha Platform) accompanied by the fevered scribbling of circles on Becks famous whiteboard. Yet, for all its eccentricities, Donnellys populism identified a genuine gulf between ordinary citizens and financial oligarchs. Beck, by contrast, performs a more ticklish task: it is not, one imagines, so simple to pen a populist novel in which capitalist tycoons feature as downtrodden victims. In Becks afterword, hes most explicit about his economics, warning how terms such as inefficiencies of the market,concentration of wealth, and social injustice should send shivers down the spine of anyone who cares about capitalism and true individual freedoms. In the novel itself, we find Emmelines friend Joan recalling the work ethic of the old order: If we worked hard we would succeed, she explains wistfully. Individuals could work and be rewarded for their effort. But individual efforts a dangerous theme in a manuscript that Beck purchased wholesale from an obscure author named Harriet Parke (her name appears below his). So, for the most part, Agenda 21 emphasises culture rather than class. The environmental Republic bans mention of God. It disallows home schooling. It forbids talk of US history. It even (shades of Michelle Obama!) forces Americans to exercise on treadmills. The contradiction between the books ostensible sympathy for the plain folk and its avowed enthusiasm for big capital (an opposition between its form and its content, if you

JEFF SPARROW

like) remains unresolved. On the one hand, the novel is a long polemic against the perniciousness of environmentalism; on the other, the characters resistance to ecofascism entails a strange nostalgia for nature. The smell of green, the smell of growing, says Emmelines father, pining for his farm. How I miss the smell of a green, living thing. Becks conservative populism exults the values of rural America (against sneering urban elites) even as it proselytizes for a market capitalism that renders small farms unviable, a tension evident in the peculiar rhetorical similarity between this doughty son-of-the-soil and the squirrel-worshipping Enforcers who oppress him. Theres a similar ambiguity about motherhood, a central theme of the book. The Republic needs children, and so conducts compulsory pairings of fertile women to produce babies for the regime. Emmeline accordingly becomes a kind of Mama Grizzly, whose determination to rescue her child leads her to flee the compound in search of the legendary Shadow People, rumoured to live free in the wild. But that means she stands against the Enforcers compulsory religious meetings, events where the congregation chants in unison, Praise be to reproductiona message not so very different from todays Christian Right. Bizarrely, Emmeline evolves into a kind of sexual rebel who sleeps with the man she likes despite the Republics (very traditional) ban on pre-pairing hookups. Again, you can see the strains involved in crafting a heroine for a movement that both fetishes old-fashioned values and advocates
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a neoliberalism innately corrosive of traditions, sexual or otherwise. Agenda 21 thus illustrates how the populist Right maintains its coherence less from a common platform than by shared resentments. Plot-wise, it might seem incongruous that an environmental and fascistly PC Republic forces women to wear headscarvesexcept that, politically, Beck knows the importance of Islamophobia to his readership and must therefore appeal to it, even if so doing makes no narrative sense whatsoever. Donnellys dystopia can be grouped generically with the outpouring of utopianism in the same era (think of Bellamys Looking Backward or William Morriss News from Nowhere). Though Caesars Column mostly chronicles the destruction of civilization, it concludes with Weltstein and his friends building their own walled populist paradise in the mountains. Theres no similar moment in Agenda 21and its hard to see how there could be, since Becks populism shapes its constituency by a nostalgia for a vanished America and a hatred for its enemies rather than any vision of a world to come. Mind you, that doesnt mean his paranoiac rhetoric possesses no force. Since those who speak about Agenda 21 are constantly marginalized as radicals or conspiracy theorists, writes Beck in his afterword, I wanted to include a link to the official 2012 GOP platform, which formalizes the partys opposition to the plan. The links entirely genuineand thats much more frightening than anything in his novel. n

Revenge of Geography
By JASON DITTMER

Robert Kaplan attempts geography as penance

Robert D. Kaplan The Revenge of Geography: What The Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and The Battle Against Fate Random House, 2012, 432 pages

WHAT DID WE do to geography to get it so mad? quipped the cashier, eyeing the cover when I bought Robert Kaplans latest from a bookstore in my hometown. I have to admit that I laughedas a geographer you get so used to the un-funny jokes (you must get tired of coloring in maps all the time) that when you hear something new it is a genuine pleasure. But the joke seems oddly prescient now that I have read the book. Indeed, there have been crimes against geography, with Kaplan the latest perpetrator. It may seem strange for a geographer like me to take umbrage with a book so devoted to the advocacy of my field. Kaplan passionately believes in the importance of geography, the problem being that he views it as an occulted knowledge, long since lost to humanity. Instead of treating geography as a living and evolving discipline, he derives his argument entirely from ideas that were popular at the turn of the 20th century and have been roundly discredited since. Kaplan argues that liberal scholars and foreign policy elites have bought into the rhetoric of globalization such that theyve begun to ignore geography. He wants to reintroduce geography, via notions of natural borders and of the limits imposed on human action by unchanging topographi56

JASON DITTMER

cal features, into the production of foreign policy: mountains and the men who grow out of them are the first order of reality; ideas, however uplifting and fortifying, only the second. This elevation of the material world over political ideals, while not dismissing the latter, is an intervention into the long-running debate among international relations theorists as to whether the world can be improved and conflict eradicated, or whether such idealistic notions only lead to more conflictconflict that could be reduced if we accepted so-called realities about human nature. The notion that geography imposes limits on what states may accomplish therefore buttresses realists belief in the limits of human progress. Kaplan himself writes that The Revenge of Geography is a form of realist atonement for his idealist support of the invasion of Iraq. In casting about for an explanation of what went wrong, Kaplan stumbled into the shallows of geopolitics. Geopolitics is a branch of geography that originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular, Kaplan draws on the work of Sir Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman, who created an Anglo-American geopolitical tradition that emphasized the role of Eurasia in world politics, with land-based powers from its interior (the heartland) competing with maritime powers from the margins of Eurasia (the rimland) or beyond (the outer crescent). Kaplan and his antecedents argue that this dynamic is visible throughout history, with Mongols, Huns, and later Russians striking out for the coastlines of Europe, the Middle East, South and East Asia, always to be beaten back but only after leaving their mark
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on those regions. However, as many scholars have noted over the past several decades, this is a West-centric understanding of history in which the peoples of the West are innocents seeking merely to contain (to use the Cold War term) the heartlands land-based aggression. This is an odd reading of the modern era, during which a series of Western (maritime) powers have dominated most of the world. Its history viewed from the perspective of first a British imperialist (Mackinder) and now an American foreign policy pundit (Kaplan), both uncertainly eyeing rising powers that may threaten their countrys preeminence. That geopolitics is the tool of the powerful becomes most apparent when Kaplan engages with Nazi Geopolitikthe German tradition that, in the wake of the First World War, criticized the limits of artificial borders such as those hemming in post-Versailles Germany. Karl Haushoferthe leading proponent of Geopolitikalso drew heavily on Mackinder, but Kaplan faults Haushofer for what he did with those theories: While Mackinder saw the future in terms of a balance of power that would protect freedom, Haushofer was determined to overthrow the balance of power altogether; thus he perverted geopolitics, (emphasis mine). In other words, geopolitical thought is meant to legitimate and maintain the status quo. Kaplan approvingly cites Arnold Toynbees argument that a tropical climate makes life too easy for civilizational advance, while the Arctic is too harsh for anything but survival. As in the fairy tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the climates of China and the United States,

REVENGE OF GEOGRAPHY

both in the mid-latitudes, are neither too hard nor too soft, but just right (apparently wealthy Singapore, at one degree north of the equator, didnt get the memo). It is hard to see much room in this account for a political order other than the one we have, but it is relatively easy to see imperial racial clichs about the laziness of the natives. Geopolitics is all about the maintenance of our place at the top of the global food chain. Mackinder, Spykman, and Kaplan all update the original heartland thesis to reflect whatever the current perceived threat to their worldleading state is: Russia, Germany, the Soviet Union, and now whoever dominates Central Asia (Russia? China? Iran? Kaplan is here admirably noncommittal). For a quasi-permanent feature of the earths surface, geography sure seems vibrant enough to require lots of new editions of geopolitical texts. A common thread in all these revisions is that they locate the new pivot of geopolitics somewhere in Eurasia. Proponents of geopolitics see this constant revision as evidence of suppleness of thought and the recognition that geography is not fate. An alternate, more coherent, interpretation is that the geopolitical analyst reads geography through the lens of her or his own shifting imperial anxieties, meaning that an objective understanding of geography is always doomed to fail. Eurasia is both home to the Orient (the tacit opponent of the West, the oft-used synonym for NATO) and just happens to be big enough that you can always find evidence of a geopolitical hotspot somewhere to legitimate Mackinders theory. Kaplan is clearly concerned with the criti58

cism of Mackinder and other early geopolitical analysts as geographical determinists (i.e., believers that human agency is entirely subordinate to environmental influence). He is at pains to express belief that technology, ideas, and effort can make a difference in the unfolding of history. However, the words he uses to describe the relationship between human agency and geography (probabilistic determinism, hesitant determinism) prioritize the static quality of geography while offering a possibility of transcending it, especially through knowledge of the terrain. However, Kaplan never precisely explains how geography can be transcended, or under what circumstances it is futile to try. Rather than any specific theory, Kaplan invokes geography as a kind of vector that it is easier to flow with than against, e.g. Mountains are a conservative force. The metaphors limits become apparent when Kaplan tries to attribute historical outcomes to geography. For instance, his belief that Russia is fundamentally a land-based power leads to this explanation of the tension between its two historic capitals: So in the short run Peter triumphed [in creating St. Petersburg as his new capital.] But in the end land-bound Moscowand geography again won out. Human volition has its limits. What exactly is being argued here? Did the mystical power of geography move the government to Moscow? Or are human decisions always already rooted in geographical circumstances, even as people work to change those circumstances? At times the metaphor of geography as a vector seems to substitute for any kind of explanation, mystical or otherwise,

JASON DITTMER

such as when Kaplan argues for the coming dominance of China over Southeast Asia: For it is here in Southeast Asia, with its 568 million people, where Chinas 1.3 billion people converge with the Indian subcontinents 1.5 billion people. The verb converge connotes a coming together of forces, a recognizably Kaplan-esque turn of phrase. But what does it mean in this case, when presumably he does not mean migration of everyone in China and
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India to Southeast Asia? The mere statement of demographic numbers is no substitute for explanation. And so we arrive at the main charge against Kaplan: his fundamental misunderstanding of geography. Geography is the backdrop to human history itself, he says. Geography, in Kaplans hands, is everything quasi-permanent: physical landforms, macro-scaled cultural patterns, and so on. Further, geography is opposed to the dynamism of human action. In short, Kaplan constructs a binary in which geography is to history as nature is to nurture, or as realist theories of international relations are to idealist theories of the same. Debates about these binaries go on forever because they are essentially unsolvable, being ultimately manifestations of the analysts pessimism or optimism. And in a complex world, pessimists and optimists can always find evidence. Contemporary geographers, however, have tried to move past such dated structures of thought. We see geography as neither static nor overwhelming; rather geographies are lively and always in fluxsimultaneously shaping our actions and being produced through them. Kaplans attempt to inject the environment into otherwise abstract foreign policy discussions is to be applauded, as attention to such matters is crucial for many contemporary debates, such as climate change. But if he thinks geography is limited to the physical environment, and that our best theorization of the relationship between geography and politics comes from long-dead Victorian thinkers like Mackinder, he is mistaken. n

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ITS A NEW year, and the beginning of a second one for this column and the magazine it appears in. We are back. We have returned, and were very happy to be here. I know what some of you are thinking (dont suppose for a minute that I cant see that internal, gloating smile forming on the lips that live in your brain): Hey, theyre back. Whats up with that? Why is that end-of-times guy still yapping away instead of eating canned goods in a bunker somewhere? If that little kerfuffle with the Mayan end-of-world fail is on your mind, then its best we part company right now. Lets not waste any more of my precious time. I dont care what Bob Dylan said; I say do think twiceat least twice. This column is not about predicting the future or lack of one but is rather a reading of the present that can help us proceed to the exits in an enjoyable way and at a safe speed. It can be a guide for what to pick up along the road to smooth the way through your last laps, or it can offer hints at what to ditch. As important as it is to go out in style, its most important to go out in your own style. Be the boss of you. No matter how great your life is, no one should wind up like that Fassbinder film Berlin Alexanderplatz: 15 perfect hours and then poof, it all goes wonky in the last 30 minutes. Trust me: No one wants this. Our egress will define our existence.

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So if you keep reading and take my advice, I can promise you a shot at a peaceful and pleasurable departure. We will make a joyful noise, but in a quiet way. Balance will be our guiding light. Its going to be a bissel of this and a bissel of that way of life, or if you prefer a different sort of cultural appropriation, think of it as a thoughtful mix of yin and yang. And for all those my way or the highway types, they can think of it as a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. What Im trying to say here is that everyone has their own way; the important thing is to be on your way.

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One thing we need above all is fun. Sounds simple, but fun can be the fuel that drives us where we want to go. In the midst of the many good times were had by all periods that you will experience on your fun quests, please try to remember that we still have a future and we will always have a past. We need to keep them, both of them, in the front of our minds and deep in our hearts. If we can make a sweet cocktail of those two parts of ourselves, then I know well be able to fly through the end of times with the greatest of ease. We might even have time for a little philosophy, a bit of cosmic Q & A. Who knows, we might finally get answers to some of the big questions weve always had, like What is the politically correct way to eat a black-and-white cookie? or Will there ever be a final season of Arrested Development? But remember, even if none of the puzzles of our life are solved or any of its questions answered, we still need to happily acknowledge having embraced our doubts and be thankful for the lifeblood that is our curiosity. So ride with me, friends, through the end times, and Ill take the top downthat I can guarantee. n

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