Abstract

The idea of climate has always fulfilled important psychological, cultural and political functions. Climate may be understood according to aggregated statistics of weather or apprehended more intuitively, as a tacit idea held in social memory. But however defined, “climate” establishes certain expectations about the possibility of stable and meaningful human action in the world. In this talk I offer evidence for this argument drawing upon the environmental humanities—anthropology, literary and religious studies, environmental history and cultural geography, as I reflect on the reasons we might need to think differently in the Anthropocene about the idea of climate.