Here in Fond Du Lac, WI, December 4 has officially become the day of the first snow. I woke to it at 9am this morning, when the first flurries were coming down, and it has since turned into a full blown snowstorm. Already I have seen various responses to it. A friend mentioned it disparagingly in an email while my neighbor’s kids are hard at work building a snowman. And my cat is officially frustrated at being unable to go outside.
Clearly the weather plays an important role in who we are, how we feel, and what we do. This point was emphasized to me this morning by trained Shaman Myron Eshowsky, who has mediated conflicts throughout the world. He said that the Syrian conflict and refugee crisis is partially a result of climate change, and of Assad’s ineffectual response to the worst drought the Middle East has seen in generations. It is important to properly theorize our relationship to the environment to avoid both the potential harm we could do to it as well as the harm it could do to us. Here are some thoughts on how climatology and philosophy can help us rethink both who we are and where we live for the better.
- Wei Zhang, “Can Cosmological Models Explain and Forecast the Public Health and Patterns of Somatic Alignments,” Philosophy East and West, October 2015.
- Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker, “Weathering: Climate Change and the ‘Thick Time’ of Transcorporeality,” Hypatia, June 2014.
- Simon Donner, “Making the Climate a Part of the Human World,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, October 2011.
- Cameron Shelley, “The Influence of Folk Meteorology in the Anaximander Fragment,” Journal of the History of Ideas, January 2000.
- Vincent Colapietro, “The Weather World of Human Experience,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, January 2015.
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