Climatic Media

Climatic Media
Author: Yuriko Furuhata
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2022-01-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478022434

In Climatic Media, Yuriko Furuhata traces climate engineering from the early twentieth century to the present, emphasizing the legacies of Japan’s empire building and its Cold War alliance with the United States. Furuhata boldly expands the scope of media studies to consider technologies that chemically “condition” Earth’s atmosphere and socially “condition” the conduct of people, focusing on the attempts to monitor and modify indoor and outdoor atmospheres by Japanese scientists, technicians, architects, and artists in conjunction with their American counterparts. She charts the geopolitical contexts of what she calls climatic media by examining a range of technologies such as cloud seeding and artificial snowflakes, digital computing used for weather forecasting and weather control, cybernetics for urban planning and policing, Nakaya Fujiko’s fog sculpture, and the architectural experiments of Tange Lab and the Metabolists, who sought to design climate-controlled capsule housing and domed cities. Furuhata’s transpacific analysis offers a novel take on the elemental conditions of media and climate change.

Climatic Media

Climatic Media
Author: Yuriko Furuhata
Publisher: Elements
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2022
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781478017806

Yuriko Furuhata traces climate engineering from the early twentieth century to the present, showing how a range of Japanese scientists, technicians, architects, and artists developed technologies to monitor, condition, and modify climate.

Finite Media

Finite Media
Author: Sean Cubitt
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2016-12-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822373475

While digital media give us the ability to communicate with and know the world, their use comes at the expense of an immense ecological footprint and environmental degradation. In Finite Media Sean Cubitt offers a large-scale rethinking of theories of mediation by examining the environmental and human toll exacted by mining and the manufacture, use, and disposal of millions of phones, computers, and other devices. The way out is through an eco-political media aesthetics, in which people use media to shift their relationship to the environment and where public goods and spaces are available to all. Cubitt demonstrates this through case studies ranging from the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang to an image of Saturn taken during NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission, suggesting that affective responses to images may generate a populist environmental politics that demands better ways of living and being. Only by reorienting our use of media, Cubitt contends, can we overcome the failures of political elites and the ravages of capital.

Weather, Climate, and the Geographical Imagination

Weather, Climate, and the Geographical Imagination
Author: Martin Mahony
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2020-03-24
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822987554

As global temperatures rise under the forcing hand of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, new questions are being asked of how societies make sense of their weather, of the cultural values, which are afforded to climate, and of how environmental futures are imagined, feared, predicted, and remade. Weather, Climate, and Geographical Imagination contributes to this conversation by bringing together a range of voices from history of science, historical geography, and environmental history, each speaking to a set of questions about the role of space and place in the production, circulation, reception, and application of knowledges about weather and climate. The volume develops the concept of “geographical imagination” to address the intersecting forces of scientific knowledge, cultural politics, bodily experience, and spatial imaginaries, which shape the history of knowledges about climate.

Media Hot and Cold

Media Hot and Cold
Author: Nicole Starosielski
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2021-10-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478021845

In Media Hot and Cold Nicole Starosielski examines the cultural dimensions of temperature to theorize the ways heat and cold can be used as a means of communication, subjugation, and control. Diving into the history of thermal media, from infrared cameras to thermostats to torture sweatboxes, Starosielski explores the many meanings and messages of temperature. During the twentieth century, heat and cold were broadcast through mass thermal media. Today, digital thermal media such as bodily air conditioners offer personalized forms of thermal communication and comfort. Although these new media promise to help mitigate the uneven effects of climate change, Starosielski shows how they can operate as a form of biopower by determining who has the ability to control their own thermal environment. In this way, thermal media can enact thermal violence in ways that reinforce racialized, colonial, gendered, and sexualized hierarchies. By outlining how the control of temperature reveals power relations, Starosielski offers a framework to better understand the dramatic transformations of hot and cold media in the twenty-first century.

Down to Earth

Down to Earth
Author: Bruno Latour
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2018-11-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1509530592

The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people. What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial. The Left has been slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders. This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.

A Climate of Injustice

A Climate of Injustice
Author: J. Timmons Roberts
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2006-11-22
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0262264412

The global debate over who should take action to address climate change is extremely precarious, as diametrically opposed perceptions of climate justice threaten the prospects for any long-term agreement. Poor nations fear limits on their efforts to grow economically and meet the needs of their own people, while powerful industrial nations, including the United States, refuse to curtail their own excesses unless developing countries make similar sacrifices. Meanwhile, although industrialized countries are responsible for 60 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change, developing countries suffer the "worst and first" effects of climate-related disasters, including droughts, floods, and storms, because of their geographical locations. In A Climate of Injustice, J. Timmons Roberts and Bradley Parks analyze the role that inequality between rich and poor nations plays in the negotiation of global climate agreements. Roberts and Parks argue that global inequality dampens cooperative efforts by reinforcing the "structuralist" worldviews and causal beliefs of many poor nations, eroding conditions of generalized trust, and promoting particularistic notions of "fair" solutions. They develop new measures of climate-related inequality, analyzing fatality and homelessness rates from hydrometeorological disasters, patterns of "emissions inequality," and participation in international environmental regimes. Until we recognize that reaching a North-South global climate pact requires addressing larger issues of inequality and striking a global bargain on environment and development, Roberts and Parks argue, the current policy gridlock will remain unresolved.

Creative (Climate) Communications

Creative (Climate) Communications
Author: Maxwell Boykoff
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-07-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107195381

Through this assessment of creative (climate) communications, readers will understand what works where, when, why and under what conditions.

Environing Media

Environing Media
Author: Adam Wickberg
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2022-08-22
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1000728269

This edited volume interrogates the role of media technologies in the formation of environments, understood both as physical spaces and as epistemological constructs about them. Using the concept of ‘environing media’, the book advances a deeper understanding of how media processes – defined here as the storage, process, and transmission of data – influence human-Earth relations. Virtually all aspects of the interconnected global ecological crisis can be related to the intensification and acceleration of scaling up the human imprint on the planet by technological means. Combining ideas from the humanities, arts, and humanistic social sciences, Environing Media offers a perspective on how we entered the current geological epoch – the Anthropocene. The ten chapters explore colonial, planetary, and elemental environing media, with cases including indigenous history, ocean monitoring, computational history, climate modeling, environmental history, the air as medium, the biosphere, and the Earth system. Drawing upon a breadth of examples and expertise in history, anthropology, geography, cultural history, science and technology studies, and media studies, the book discovers a novel approach to human-Earth histories that demonstrates how technologies have mediated between humans and environments and in the process contributed to a societal feedback loop between knowing and doing environment, each impacting the other. Environing Media is a timely addition for scholars and upper-level students in environmental humanities and media studies. The Open Access version of chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9 are available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003282891. Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, and 7 have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. Chapters 3, 8, and 9 have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) license.

The Climate of History in a Planetary Age

The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
Author: Dipesh Chakrabarty
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2021-03-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 022673286X

Introduction : intimations of the planetary -- The globe and the planet. Four theses; Conjoined histories; The planet : a humanist category -- The difficulty of being modern. The difficulty of being modern; Planetary aspirations : reading a suicide in India; In the ruins of an enduring fable -- Facing the planetary. Anthropocene time -- Toward an anthropological clearing -- Postscript : the global reveals the planetary : a conversation with Bruno Latour.