Agricultural History Review, Volume 66 Part 2 (2018), p. 304

Climate change figures prominently in historical studies nowadays. However, most historical climate studies have adopted a natural science approach or use scientific data rather than historical records. The role of historians is often reduced to coming up with useful historical weather or climate data, or explaining how the environment affected human societies.

Tom Bristow and Thomas H. Ford here present a different approach. In A cultural history of climate change, the physical climate itself is not the protagonist. No climate reconstruction, temperature series or precipitation estimate will be found in this book. Bristow and Ford have attempted to move beyond the empirical study of climate and provide us a more philosophical investigation into the historical climate. What is climate change in a cultural context? What do we understand by climate change? How have we constructed, mediated and processed this environmental crisis? These questions are as vital as a natural science approach because the climate is all around us. Not only have humans influenced the climate since the Anthropocene, climate is always perceived and experienced through a human lens. Regardless of the exact temperature rise, climate change and variability have become a social fact. Both climate-change believers and deniers have to deal with the issue of climate change. This endeavour to move beyond the physical climate in both present and past is praiseworthy. Unfortunately, this edited volume cannot live up to the coherent introduction because of the rather disparate collection of individual chapters.

Bristow and Ford have divided the individual chapters in three subsections, titled: ‘climates of history’, ‘climates of writing’ and ‘climates of politics’. In the first part ‘climates of history’, the historical origins of our modern concepts and ideas regarding climate change and weather are traced and analysed. This is by far the most interesting and thought provoking part of the book. The neutral character of the way we measure and label weather events or respond to climate variability is deconstructed here. For example, Chris O’Brien shows us that our Western ideas about time, seasons and weather influence the way we interpret weather variability. Western societies have constructed a sense of regularity and linearity to explain weather patterns. Seasons start and stop on fixed days and average levels of precipitation and sunshine can be predicted per month. This culturally constructed concept of time and seasons does not correspond to actual weather patterns however. Variability is more common than our western statistics and predictions allow us to foresee. O’Brien offers several options to move beyond our regular models. This is useful in a time of climate change, when we are trying to distinguish between normal and extraordinary variability. Deb Anderson shows how historical attitudes and visions regarding climate still shape the way we respond to climate change. In the Australian Mallee, farmers have always cultivated a sense of endurance to cope with extreme weather events, such as drought, which persists to the present even when challenged by even more extreme droughts and climate variability. Jerome Whitington, shows that our twenty-first-century positivism and attempts to develop climate models on a global scale are indebted to the first scientific and hypothetical analyses of Joseph Fourier. In his quest to discover the average temperature of the entire globe in the hypothetical situation of an absent atmosphere, Fourier developed probabilistic reasoning and imagined different possible futures, which we still apply today for our future climate reconstructions. Finally, Linda Williams shows that the roots of both our conservation movements as well as our degrading approach to nature can be found in seventeenth-century ideas and ideologies.

The other two sections lack the coherence and relevance of the first section. The stated goal of the book is to show that there are limits to a short-sighted approach to climate and that a cultural history is necessary to think about ‘the limits of the present’ (p. 31). Most chapters in the last two sections do little to spark a debate, nor do they show the ability of cultural history to challenge current policies or paradigms.

Section 2 analyses how climate change has figured in our modern literature and how prominent writers have thought about climate and weather. In contrast to the title, none of the authors in this section actually discuss climate change per se. The authors hunt for ideas about the natural environment, the globe, nature or climate in the works of Wittgenstein, Kant or Zola. Most illustrative are the chapters of Karen Pinkus and Roslyn Jolly. In the chapter ‘Fuels and humans’, Pinkus links Zola’s ideas of the interconnectedness of humans and their environment with our present day Anthropocene, arguing that the descriptions of the fusing of coal mines and coal miners in Germinal anticipate bio-engineering. Jolly on her part imagines a link between climate change and the change of climate – or rather medical tourism – that was prescribed to nineteenth-century patients. Yet the authors have missed the opportunity to trace ideas and perceptions of climate and climate variability in historical writings. Climate variability is not a modern phenomenon and human society has been writing about this for centuries, but unfortunately an analysis of pre-modern sentiments regarding weather extremes and climate is missing here.

In section 3 the authors propose a reflexive position, investigating ways in which climate has figured historically in the construction of policies. Nevertheless, a common thread is lacking in this section. Nick Mansfield warns us that a focus on climate mitigation and the idea to return to a fixed point in history – namely 1990 – is a radical political choice rather than a neutral scientific endeavour. S. Romi Mukherjee shows us that the Anthropocene has given rise to a new set of religions, such as eco paganism, humanitarian religion and especially anthropocentric apocalypticism. Nicole Rogers analyses the pros and cons of judicial actions versus activism to counter climate change and develop a new paradigm as opposed to capitalism. Finally, Timothy Morton philosophizes about the concepts of nature and environment in the era of the Anthropocene. The focus lies almost entirely on the last decades and the promised historical approach or attempt to look beyond the twentieth century is largely missing.

As a result, this edited volume provides some interesting individual chapters in the first section, but fails to provide an innovative and relevant cultural history of climate change. The quest to answer what climate change means, and has meant in the past, therefore has to be continued.