Better Weather?: The Cultivation of the Sky

Abstract

What are humans doing to the Earth's atmosphere? Changing it, yes, as was acknowledged in the first international political meeting on climate change, held in Toronto in June 1988, called The Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security. But are humans also damaging or destroying the atmosphere, as implied in the 1980s narrative of the depletion of the stratosphere's ozone layer? Are we polluting the atmosphere with excess carbon dioxide or, as some would have it, fertilizing the atmosphere with an essential plant nutrient? And when considering the objectives of climate policy, what metaphors are used to describe the project: Is the Earth's climate being controlled, enhanced, protected, preserved , or restored? In an essay written a decade ago, the environmental theologian Willis Jenkins (2005) argued that it is important to pay careful attention not simply to metaphors used to describe nature. Scrutiny is equally important of metaphors used to describe human agency with regard to the natural world. Writing from an environmental ethics perspective, he offered two guiding criteria for evaluating metaphors of agency. Well-chosen metaphors should, first, capture the complexity of there

Full text

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 30, Issue 2, pp. 236–244, ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. 䉷by the
American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.14506/ca30.2.06
Openings and Retrospectives
BETTER WEATHER?: The Cultivation of the Sky
MIKE HULME
King’s College London
What are humans doing to the Earth’s atmosphere? Changing it, yes, as was
acknowledged in the first international political meeting on climate change, held
in Toronto in June 1988, called The Changing Atmosphere: Implications for
Global Security. But are humans also damaging or destroying the atmosphere, as
implied in the 1980s narrative of the depletion of the stratosphere’s ozone layer?
Are we polluting the atmosphere with excess carbon dioxide or, as some would
have it, fertilizing the atmosphere with an essential plant nutrient? And when
considering the objectives of climate policy, what metaphors are used to describe
the project: Is the Earth’s climate being controlled, enhanced, protected, pre-
served, or restored?
In an essay written a decade ago, the environmental theologian Willis Jenkins
(2005) argued that it is important to pay careful attention not simply to metaphors
used to describe nature. Scrutiny is equally important of metaphors used to de-
scribe human agency with regard to the natural world. Writing from an environ-
mental ethics perspective, he offered two guiding criteria for evaluating metaphors
of agency. Well-chosen metaphors should, first, capture the complexity of there

BETTER WEATHER?
237
being various degrees of the natural and the artificial, and, second, they should
accommodate a productive role for human interventions while remaining alert to
the degenerative potential of such actions. Thus perfecting or caring for nature
would, he argued, win out over preserving or managing.
So what are humans doing to the Earth’s atmosphere and hence to the
weather that it yields? Are we cultivating or polluting the atmosphere, enhancing
or destroying, caring or abandoning, conserving or depleting it? In this essay I
want to use the specific metaphor of cultivation—which I think meets Jenkins’s
two criteria—to reflect on the human relationship with the atmosphere and its
weather. After all, humans quite happily cultivate the land and ocean; why should
they not cultivate the sky? Human cultivating practices throughout countless gen-
erations have yielded agricultures, horticultures, aquacultures, silvicultures, and
permacultures. Is it fruitful, is it possible even, to think in terms of weathercul-
tures? What weather might humans be cultivating?
THE TROUBLE WITH WEATHER
To start this brief investigation, we must think some more about weather.
Humans have always had a problem with their weather—the fruit of the sky.
Weather never quite performs to desire or expectation. It is constantly in flux;
weather is always both passing away and in renewal. It brings blessing and danger,
offers comfort and fear. Weather can lay the conditions for both life and death.
It is always unruly and yet in some way, as the atmosphere moves through the
seasons, also regular. Given this otherness about the weather, its importance for
human well-being yet its uncontrollability, it seems unsurprising that the sky
became an obvious home for the gods—the gods of thunder, lightning, rain, and
wind. Supplications were, and still are, made to these gods, and to others also,
entreating them to bring benign or beneficent weather, to show mercy on crops,
homes, rivers, and seas. Many ancient mythologies or religions viewed the sky as
“the domain of the gods” (Donner 2007).
Similar animistic sentiments have been held in relation to forests, oceans,
swamps, deserts, and mountains, all of which have been for many—and remain
for some—the dwelling place of the gods. But through practices of human cul-
tivation over many generations, these other spirit-dwelling domains have become
disenchanted and naturalized. Forests and the ocean deeps are no longer feared,
but felled and fished; swamps are drained, deserts irrigated, mountains conquered.
Landscapes have become cultivated.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 30:2
238
But while this has not happened in quite the same way with the sky, I want
to suggest that the idea of climate has in a different way marked an attempt to
cultivate the atmosphere (cf. Hulme forthcoming). The idea of climate introduces
a sense of stability or normality into what would otherwise be for humans too
chaotic and disturbing an experience of unruly and unpredictable weather. Al-
though the weather often fails to meet human expectations, the fact that we do
have expectations derives from the idea of climate: “Climate is the ordinary man’s
[sic] expectation of weather . . . there is a limit to the indignities that the weather
can put upon him, and he can predict what clothes he will need for each month
of the year” (Hare 1966, 99–100). As a normalizing idea, climate offers humans
some sense of security. It allows us to put weather in its place, so to speak. Or
as Lorraine Daston (2010, 32) explains in her essay exploring the boundaries of
nature, “without well-founded expectations, the world of causes and promises
falls apart.”
Climate serves such a purpose and so should be understood as performing
important psychological and cultural functions. Climate offers a way of navigating
between the human experience of a constantly changing atmosphere with its
attendant insecurities and the need to live with a sense of stability and regularity.
Humans look to the idea of climate to offer an ordered container—a linguistic,
sensory, or numerical repertoire—through which to tame and interpret the un-
settling arbitrariness of the restless weather. This container creates Daston’s nec-
essary orderliness. Climate may be defined according to the aggregated statistics
of weather in places or as a scientific description of an interacting physical system.
Climate may also be apprehended more intuitively, as a tacit idea held in the
human mind or in the social memory of what the weather of a place should be
at a certain time of year. But however defined, formally or tacitly, it is our sense
of climate that establishes certain expectations about the atmosphere’s perfor-
mance. The idea of climate enables the possibility of a stable psychological life
and of meaningful human action in the world. Put simply, the idea of climate
allows humans to live culturally with their weather. As with other cultivational
practices, the stabilizing idea of climate has developed, produced, and even, in
some sense, improved the weather by giving it cultural meaning.
In following this line of thinking, the trouble with weather thus emerges as
threefold. First, our gods have abandoned us—or rather, many of us have largely
abandoned our gods. We have stopped believing in anyone wiser or more be-
nevolent than ourselves. Our fates are left to the inanimate and cold mercy of
the skies and the weather it leaves us with. But now this disenchantment of the

BETTER WEATHER?
239
skies is compounded—a second unsettling—because the protective defenses we
have built using the idea of climate as a stabilizing and ordering scheme have been
breached. The past two hundred years of scientific inquiry have shown us that
the atmosphere and its weather turn out to be deeply unstable across all time
scales (Woodward 2014), much more so than we would like. Ice sheets wax and
wane, ocean currents slow and quicken in the deep, volcanoes wreak havoc with
the skies, and ocean and atmosphere are coupled in a bewildering variety of
rhythms and dances. The idea of a stable climate is a chimera, not least during
the recent past of the Holocene, with its little ice ages, mega-droughts, and
volcanic winters (Fagan 2004). So after evacuating the atmosphere of the gods,
the fictitious idea of climate has failed to pacify and harness the weather to satisfy
human ends.
Furthermore, the past fifty years of scientific inquiry have shown us some-
thing else about the weather, the third component of our now disturbing con-
dition. These unstable atmospheric conditions are exacerbated by the conse-
quences of cumulative human actions. Through our consumption of energy and
our acquisition of food we are changing the flows of energy from sun to surface,
from atmosphere to ocean, from land to sky. We now find ourselves in a triple
bind. We have abandoned our dependence on the weather gods, and our man-
ufactured idea for bringing order to the weather, namely climate, turns out to
be not only illusory—nature is not so easily tamed (Clark 2011)—but also com-
promised by our own prolific behavior.
PROJECTS OF ATMOSPHERIC CULTIVATION
With this context established, it is possible to reflect on the range of human
projects of atmospheric cultivation. By these I mean intentional, but not always
sagacious, projects of improvement through which the sky becomes cultivated,
that is, the atmosphere bears the imprint of considered human thought, design
and action (Szerszynski 2010). Modernity has been alive with projects seeking to
cultivate the sky, projects that have aspired to an atmosphere modified in some
way so as to yield more desirable weather. I have no space here to give a proper
account of these projects, but good summaries of them can be found in the
following texts. Thus Richard H. Grove (1995) describes the emergence of pro-
jects of the European colonizers that through cultivating the land (e.g., draining
swamps, plowing soil, felling forests) in fact sought to cultivate the sky. Fabien
Locher and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2012) describe political projects of social cul-
tivation that sought indirectly to cultivate the sky through their progressive and

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 30:2
240
emancipatory goals. And in James Rodger Fleming (2010) one finds a history of
projects of great technological ingenuity and sometimes hubris (e.g., diverting
rivers, seeding clouds, diverting hurricanes) that sought to cultivate the sky by
directly intervening in the atmosphere.
Figure 1. Panel at the 2008 United Nations Climate Conference, from “The Biggest Talking
Club in the World: UN Climate Conference Ends Today,” Greenboard blog, December 12, 2008.
http://eurotope.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-biggest-talking-club-in.
If the above might be regarded as the cultivational projects of modernity—
and with limited success in many senses and in most cases—we now in the twenty-
first century have to come to terms with a new generation of imagined projects
of atmospheric improvement. There is no hiding from the extent to which the
atmosphere has been inadvertently altered with the byproducts of industrial pro-
cesses (e.g., CFCs [chlorofluorocarbons], fossil carbon dioxide, sulphate aerosols)
and of land practices (e.g., methane, smoke, aerosol particulates)—inadvertent
cultivation one might say, if this is not an oxymoron. And so our anxieties have
multiplied. Weather is no longer just wild—humans have always known wild
weather—but for some it is now “weird,”
1
while others deem the prospects of
further changes frighteningly dangerous (Schellnhuber et al. 2006).
And so new practices of late modern atmospheric cultivation have been
invented to un-weird the weather or to rescue it from its dangerous transgres-
sions. Thus scientists are seriously contemplating, if not researching, stratospheric
aerosol injection, injecting particles into the sky to cultivate a more benign climate
(Hulme 2014a), while technologies of carbon dioxide removal are being devel-
oped and trialed. These new projects of atmospheric improvement—in fact cul-
tivation, as I am suggesting—are not, as in the case of anthropogenic global

BETTER WEATHER?
241
warming, inadvertent. Nor are they piecemeal, as in the earlier works of mo-
dernity that sought to cultivate the atmosphere. These new projects aim to be
systemic. They aim to recondition the entire atmosphere as one cultivated by
humans and reimagined through eco-machinima such as Google Earth (Gurevitch
2014).
CULTIVATORS OF THE SKY?
So what are humans doing to the Earth’s atmosphere? Using the metaphor
of cultivation through which I have framed this essay, what sort of cultivational
aspirations and practices is humanity on the verge of implementing in the atmo-
sphere? Since we recognize that the material reach of human agency now extends
to the skies—that is, what we do on and beneath the land has consequences for
the weather—our choices must consider this knowledge. In this sense, humans
cannot escape being cultivators of the sky in one way or another (Weitzman
2014), and so we need to think critically, ethically, and politically about the
implications of this fact.
It seems to me that as a response to the passive human cultivation of the
atmosphere in past centuries, two forms of active future cultivation might usefully
be distinguished: de-cultivation and re-cultivation. De-cultivating practices would
be those activities that seek to remove substances from the sky, to put the at-
mosphere back to what it was. This follows a narrative of purification or natu-
ralization, and the range of putative carbon dioxide removal technologies exem-
plifies such an aspiration. There are parallels here with the idea of rewilding (e.g.,
Monbiot 2014) or ecological restoration (e.g., Marris 2011), both of which of
course constitute deliberate forms of cultivation. Can the atmosphere be so cul-
tivated as to re-create wild or natural weather, to cleanse the atmosphere of its
human additives and return it to some prehuman (or at least less human) condi-
tion? There is fruitful work to be done in thinking this through; many of the same
challenges and controversies may well face the atmospheric and the ecosystem
cultivator.
Re-cultivating practices, on the other hand, would be those activities seeking
to add substances to the sky, to remake the atmosphere to be what it can. This
follows a narrative of enhancement or improvement, and technologies such as
stratospheric aerosol injection exemplify such an aspiration. There are parallels
here with the aspiration of human enhancement (e.g., Hauskeller 2013, whose
title I borrowed for this essay), again a form of cultivation, but in this case
exercised on the human body. As with the atmosphere, humans are changing their

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 30:2
242
bodies inadvertently through a wide range of sociotechnical practices, and so
projects of human enhancement, correction and improvement abound. As these
human-enhancement technologies multiply, so too, I believe, will calls for the
creation of willfully cultivated, corrected, and enhanced weather (Keith 2013).
Similar questions concerning such enhancements may emerge: How benign for
the body/weather are such interventions?; How can one distinguish between the
enhanced and the unimproved condition? (see Hulme 2014b); and How far do
we desire to become masters of ourselves/the skies? Michael Hauskeller’s apol-
ogetic for the importance of retaining a certain givenness or giftedness about the
human body applies equally, it seems to me, with respect to the atmosphere.
I have suggested that the projects of both atmospheric purification and at-
mospheric enhancement constitute forms of cultivation. They resemble agricul-
tural practices: progressive projects of development and supposed improvement
through which new forms of weather will be produced. But though we cannot
avoid making choices between the above forms of cultivation—including the
option of our continued passive cultivation—we also need to recognize a limit
to the cultivating powers of the human. As Nigel Clark (2011) explains in his
book Inhuman Nature, the weather will always retain a powerful otherness. It will
never be tamed by humans’ cultivating powers, just as in the past it was never
fully tamed by supplications to the gods or through the protective idea of a stable
climate.
The weather to a substantial degree will always exceed attempts at its cul-
tivation, just as does the soil, the ocean, or indeed the human body. God’s
judgement on Adam was that “the ground is cursed because of you. All your life
you will struggle to scratch a living from it. It will grow thorns and thistles for
you, though you will eat of its grains.”
2
Just as we toil on the land and struggle
to make it yield to human needs and wants, so, too, now we are committed to
toiling in the sky. Cultivating better weather in the skies above our heads will
prove a precarious task, yet a task, I believe, that now—for good or ill—will be
never-ending.
ABSTRACT
In this essay I use the metaphor of cultivation to reflect on the developing human
relationship with the atmosphere and its weather. I suggest that the putative geo-
engineering projects of atmospheric purification and atmospheric enhancement con-
stitute forms of cultivation. They resemble agricultural practices: progressive projects

BETTER WEATHER?
243
of development and supposed improvement through which new forms of weather will
be produced.
NOTES
Acknowledgments The writing of this essay benefited from the award of a Carson Writing
Fellowship, held over the summer of 2014 at the Rachel Carson Center at the Ludwig Max-
imilians Universita¨t in Mu¨nich, Germany. Part of this article has drawn on the author’s essay
written for the SAGE Major Reference Work on Climates and Cultures, forthcoming in 2015.
1. For example, Friedman (2010) writes, “I prefer the term ‘global weirding’, because
. . . weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the
dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.”
2. Gen. 3:17–18, New International Version.
REFERENCES
Clark, Nigel
2011 Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. London: Sage.
Daston, Lorraine
2010 “The World in Order.” In Without Nature? A New Condition for Theology, edited
by David Alberston and Cabell King, 15–34. New York: Fordham University
Press.
Donner, Simon E.
2007 “Domain of the Gods: An Editorial Essay.” Climatic Change 85, nos. 3–4: 231–
36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10584-007-9307-7.
Fagan, Brian M.
2004 The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization. London: Granta.
Fleming, James Rodger
2010 Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Friedman, Thomas L.
2010 “Global Weirding is Here.” Opinion, New York Times, February 17. http://
www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/opinion/17friedman.html, accessed Septem-
ber 14, 2014.
Grove, Richard H.
1995 Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of
Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gurevitch, Leon
2014 “The Digital Globe as Climatic Coming Attraction: From Theatrical Release to
Theatre of War.” Canadian Journal of Communication 38, no. 3: 333–56.
Hare, F. Kenneth
1966 “The Concept of Climate.” Geography 51, no. 2: 99–110.
Hauskeller, Michael
2013 Better Humans? Understanding the Enhancement Project. Durham: Acumen.
Hulme, Mike
2014a Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case Against Climate Engineering. Cambridge:
Polity.
2014b “Attributing Weather Extremes to ‘Climate Change’: A Review.” Progress in
Physical Geography 38, no. 4: 499–511. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/
0309133314538644.
Forthcoming “Climate and Its Changes: A Cultural Appraisal.” Geo: Geography and
Environment.
Jenkins, Willis
2005 “Assessing Metaphors of Agency: Intervention, Perfection, and Care as Models

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 30:2
244
of Environmental Practice.” Environmental Ethics 27, no. 2: 135–54. http://
dx.doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics200527227.
Keith, David
2013 A Case for Climate Engineering. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Locher, Fabien, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
2012 “Modernity’s Frail Climate: A Climate History of Environmental Reflexivity.”
Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3: 579–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/664552.
Marris, Emma
2011 Rumbunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. London: Bloomsbury.
Monbiot, George
2014 Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea, and Human Life. London: Penguin.
Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim, Wolfgang Cramer, Nebojsa Nakicenovic, Tom Wigley, and
Gary Yohe, eds.
2006 Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Szerszynski, Bronislaw
2010 “Reading and Writing the Weather: Climate Technics and the Moment of
Responsibility.” Theory, Culture & Society 27, nos. 2–3: 9–30. http://dx.doi.org/
10.1177/0263276409361915.
Weitzman, Martin L.
2014 “The Geoengineered Planet.” In In 100 Years: Leading Economists Predict the Future,
edited by Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, 145–64. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Woodward, Jamie
2014 The Ice Age: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.