Battening the Hatches

This chapter discusses the various ways in which we've struggled to fight against or live with the weather. It frames this discussion as an exploration of dispositional attitudes and suggests that the moral valence of weather is in part a consequence of the technologies and policies we have developed to mitigate risk. Roofs, gutters, aqueducts, pumps, shades, fabrics, paints, umbrellas, parasols, and sunscreen have all done considerable work to dampen or amplify the impacts of weather on our lives. It also reflects on the three historically significant agricultural revolutions and ties them into the emergence of technologies and policies that we have used to intervene with weather. These technical innovations have themselves also shaped whole economies, transformed cities, and affected the physical landscape in which we live. It stresses in particular how contemporary theorists have sought to capture weather as one of many “ecosystem services,” an actuarial abstraction that further reframes weather, not as an unending cascade of unpredictable hazards, but instead as a gift of free services from nature. In the end, it suggests that this transforms our relationship to weather almost entirely into impact terms. The primary purpose of this chapter is to make a practical point: that weather presents a kind of ongoing, forever-looming natural hazard, but as we've been able to soften the blow of weather through practical and technical means, we have changed how we live and how we view weather.