Weathering climate: telescoping change

Abstract

As the scientific distinction between climate and weather suggests, knowledge about climate is supposed to be beyond indigenous peoples’ everyday experience of the environment in that it requires a long‐term record. On the basis of ethnographic work among geoscientists in Scotland and West Greenland, I show that practitioners of this discipline have mastered the craft of turning ‘visible’ what is ‘invisible’ to the senses by playing with shorter time‐scales. In thinking and communicating about the past, geoscientists would compress and accelerate long‐term environmental processes, often at the cost of dissociating them from processes occurring at shorter time‐scales, particularly the adaptation of living organisms. Attending to the historical circumstances around the development of this skill, I argue that it relates to an ideal of objectivity in science that corresponds to an optical understanding of time, inspired by the image of the telescope. Challenging the distinction between climate and weather, and the epistemic distance on which it rests, I discuss recent approaches in environmental anthropology that have uncritically adopted this distinction to distinguish indigenous knowledge of the environment from climate science. In conclusion, informed by research with indigenous peoples of the Arctic, I speculate on alternative ways of understanding climate knowledge, beyond the climate‐weather distinction.

The Tempo of Solid Fluids: On River Ice, Permafrost, and Other Melting Matter in the Mackenzie Delta

“…This understanding of solid fluids questions the received opposition between the slow and stable processes of geology and climate, and the fast and fleeting dynamics of human lives. Simonetti (2019) has argued that this contrast, often considered a key conundrum of the climate crisis, dissolves when considering Indigenous concepts and even modern geologists' practices. Indigenous people are unlikely to distinguish between long-term climate and short-term weather (Ingold and Kurttila, 2000) because their profound knowledge of the world is not reducible to numerical abstractions or assumptions about solidity and its decay.…”

Weather geographies: Talking about the weather, considering diverse sovereignties

“…Further, this continued adherence to Indigenous/Western binary enacts the ghettoisation of Indigenous knowledges and their continued exclusion from 'mainstream' science and theorisation (S Hunt, 2014). Here, Indigenous knowledges are understood as somehow more ephemeral and embodied in ways that set them against the abstracted and scientific knowledges of climate change in ways that ignore both the long-term relationships and sophisticated theorisations of Indigenous knowledges and dismiss the ways that mainstream scientific knowledge is produced through embodied and everyday practice (Simonetti, 2019). Second, Indigenous knowledges are frequently presented as 'stories', 'myths' and 'legends', as descriptive metaphors for nature or ecological harmony and as 'trinkets' on the outer edges of serious debates (S Hunt, 2014;Watts, 2013).…”

“…As such, climate is constructed as something that exists separate from, and somehow beyond, the knowings of Indigenous people and, indeed, any particular mortal. Such constructions invisibilise and further dismiss the long-term relationships, understandings and theorisations that underpin many Indigenous knowledge systems as well as denying the way that climate is also encountered, felt, constructed and represented through everyday scientific practice (Leduc, 2007;Simonetti 2019). Certainly, weather and climate -if we seek to be open to the many ways they are understood and enacted in a world of many worlds -mean so much more in many cultures than is generally understood in mainstream English Leduc, 2007).…”

Introducing Solid Fluids

“…At each stage in the reduction, short-term elementary events and interactions become even shorter, and the long-term they occupy even longer: the approach towards zero in the former is also an approach towards infinity in the latter (Ingold, 2016: 141-2). In science, temporal attenuation and extension, nuclearity and deep time, are two sides of the same coin (Simonetti, 2019a;Engelmann, this issue). Now whether, with Gibson, we treat the environment as spatially intermediate, or, with Le´vi-Strauss, we regard history as intermediate on the axis of time, this logic indexes a shift in the meaning of intermediacy, from the relational quality of observers being in among the matters of their concern to the middle range on a quantitative scale of diminution or enlargement, running from micro to macro.…”