The weather is now political

This article is part of the Democracy Futures series, a joint global initiative between The Conversation and the Sydney Democracy Network. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.

Until recently, weather talk was an easy filler for any awkward silence. But tragically for polite conversationalists everywhere, the weather is no longer mundane.

Especially in summers like the one we just had in Sydney, weather talk has many of us breaking a surprising sweat — and not only from the heat. With climate change a hot-button issue globally (in spite and even because of its lack of mention in national budgets, or erasure from government websites), talk about the weather now has an unavoidably political tinge.

While it may not lead directly to impassioned critiques of climate governance, nor immediately sort the sceptics from the believers, talk of brewing storms or dried-up reservoirs now carries with it a whiff of trepidation about our collective forecasts.

Bridging the divide

Despite the growing politicisation of weather talk, weather and climate are usually understood as empirically distinct bodies of knowledge. Climate is, to quote British comedy duo Armstrong and Miller, “a long-term trend averaged over many years”, as opposed to weather, “which is what’s going on outside the window right now”.

The problem with this distinction is that climate change’s global reach and extended time scale can make it seem like it is happening somewhere else and to someone else (or, indeed, not at all). So perhaps the distinction is not useful for the cultural processes of adaptation. What might happen if we were to breach official definitions and disciplinary lines and think of the two things together?

Closing the distance between weather as event and climate as pattern can accomplish several things. Most obviously, it reminds us that there is a relationship between the two. Without weather, there would be nothing to amalgamate as climate.

While one heatwave does not equate to “climate change”, many and increasing ones give us pause to wonder. Leslie Hughes and Will Steffen are doing the data-driven work in this regard.

Ironically, though, while the complexity of climate data might put me off engaged concern for the global climate, the exhaustion I feel cycling behind a truck in 30℃-plus weather might do the opposite. Maybe this bodily discomfort is part of the point.

In other words, bringing climate and weather together can remind us that climate change is not only about abstract calculations on scales too big for our small and ultimately short-lived human forms to fathom.

Thinking about weather as part of climate underscores that we experience climate change with and on our bodies; climate change is lived by us at a very human scale, too.

The daily experience of weathering

So, what would it mean to harness the daily, mundane intrusions of weather as political? In contrast to terms like resilience (complicit with neoliberal incitements of bootstrapping) or sustainability (which suggests we get to keep something intact), weathering invites us to consider what we will lose along the way.

Weathered bodies, weathered houses, weathered cars, weathered clothes, weathered relationships, weathered dreams – these all bear scars of what has worn them down, and of what they have been asked to carry, to survive, and to hack.

Bringing this sense of lived climate change to our everyday perception is neither an easy nor comfortable thing. For one, discomfort is not a place we generally like to dwell for long. In a more political sense, though, paying attention to the weather as something in which we are intimately implicated, not just a disconnected backdrop to our human dramas, reminds us we are weather-makers too.

Environmental activist Bill McKibben observes:

On a stable planet, nature provided a background against which the human drama took place; on the unstable planet we’re creating, the background becomes the highest drama.

This could be the epigraph for the Anthropocene.

Even in wealthy, climate-controlled places, weather inserts a reminder of one’s privilege, or luck, or vulnerability, or hardship, into those once mundane spaces. We may bemoan the slipping away of vacuous weather chats — “does everything have to be political?” — but perhaps noticing the weather can become an opening for everyday engagement in the politics of climate change instead.

In gender and cultural studies and the environmental humanities, rather than trying to leave weather-talk pregnant with fear, anticipation or political outrage, we are explicitly thinking with and through the weather to develop strategies for a rigorous and political response to climate change.

One way we are doing this is through a tactic or practice we call “weathering” – that is, cultivating attunement to how our own bodies, and bodies of others, experience weather. This includes how we and they manage it architecturally, technologically, professionally and socially.

We don’t all weather equally

Through the concept of “weathering”, our work forces a confrontation between large-scale climate data and embodied sociopolitical experiences that are too often treated as separate. It also underscores the politics and activism we hope this tactic can engender.

Such attentive acclimatisation reveals that, even though we’re all in the same planetary boat when it comes to global warming, we’re not all in it in the same way. This is something ecofeminists and environmental justice scholars have long known. Our work helps articulate how difference also marks our apparently banal encounters with the weather.

At a “Hacking the Anthropocence” symposium in Sydney this month, scholars, artists and activists are responding to the idea of “weathering”. The variety of experience that such a provocation reveals is astounding.

For Anne Werner’s and Genevieve Derwent’s work growing chickens on Autumn Farm and Cameron Muir’s reflections on life jackets for refugees, the weather holds a very different significance and function. Climate change is undoubtedly political – but all the more so because of these uneven individual and collective experiences of the weather.

Other kinds of bodily, socioeconomic, historical and geopolitical differences further complicate how we weather the world. When it comes to rising sea levels, or dried-up water holes, for example, racism, colonialism and gendered labour are all significant. Weathering as a concept thus asks us to think about what else, besides meteorological phenomena, one might be asked to weather.

Note that a more common meaning of “weathering” is as synonym for withstanding or enduring. Not only will different regions weather differently in a changing climate (drier, hotter in central Australia; more flooding on the US Atlantic coast; disappearing land in Pacific Islands), but people within those regions weather differently too.

At our upcoming symposium on weathering, Ngarigu scholar Jakelin Troy will explore what it means to weather colonisation in Australia in a time of extinction.

A world weathering together

Our human experiences of weather are linked to how the non-human world is weathering what we have forced it to carry. Artist Victoria Hunt will ask us to imagine with her “The Cry of Water”, while archaeologist Denis Byrne will explore the significance of seawalls, which are weathered by erosion. Human and non-human worlds weather together in a fraught and desirous intimacy.

It’s not just people who are feeling the heat. Dean Lewins/AAP

The animal world is also constantly weathering. We know about catastrophic events such as the endangered bats that cannot cope with heat above 42℃. We’ve learned that the Great Barrier Reef is bleaching as water temperatures rise.

But what about the less-well-known water-holding frog or, indeed, ants and brine shrimp? How do they weather? At our symposium, Rebecca Giggs, Kate Wright and Emily O’Gorman (respectively) will let us know how, and suggest what we humans might learn about weathering the world differently.

These contributions invite us to explore how our experiences of the weather are highly mediated by a range of social, political and cultural forces. Anthropologist of institutions Tess Lea will investigate how bureaucracy (materialised as mountains of paperwork) orients different populations’ capacity to weather. Cli-fi expert and petrocultures scholar Stephanie LeMenager invites us to speculate on what a new kind of civic engagement might look like in this context.

Weathering directly connects human social, cultural and economic structures such as racism, colonialism and gender oppression to climate change. It insists that we think about global warming on a massive scale as always textured by acute experiences of social phenomena.

We recognise that the weight of a changing climate will not be borne equally by bodies – across geographies, economic status, or species.

So next time you curse a forgotten umbrella as the skies open up, or welcome the sun shining on your kid’s birthday party in the park, remember that when it comes to the weather, the personal is getting more and more political.

Hacking the Anthropocene II: Weathering (May 25-31) is supported by the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC); the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions; the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney; the Planetary Health Initiative at the University of Sydney; and the Seed Box: a MISTRA-FORMAS Environmental Humanities Collaboratory (hosted at Linkoping University, Sweden).