Description
Book SynopsisIn
Immeasurable Weather Sara J. Grossman explores how environmental data collection has been central to the larger project of settler colonialism in the United States. She draws on an extensive archive of historical and meteorological data spanning two centuries to show how American scientific institutions used information about the weather to establish and reinforce the foundations of a white patriarchal settler society. Grossman outlines the relationship between climate data and state power in key moments in the history of American weather science, from the nineteenth-century public data-gathering practices of settler farmers and teachers and the automation of weather data during the Dust Bowl to the role of meteorological satellites in data science’s integration into the militarized state. Throughout, Grossman shows that weather science reproduced the natural world as something to be measured, owned, and exploited. This data gathering, she contends, gave coherence to a
Trade Review“In her analysis of the relationship between weather data and human experience, Sara J. Grossman’s main point—all the data in the world won’t save us—is stupendously timely and significant. Scholars of environmental history, of environmental humanities, and of the history of science will learn a great deal from this important book.” -- Joyce E. Chaplin, author of * Round About the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit *
“Building on the idea that science has long been embedded in racial capitalism and settler colonialism, this book argues that we should approach weather and all its entanglements in ways that reinforce rather than sever our connections to the more-than-human world and our relationships with each other. Ultimately, the book challenges the environmentalist fetish for data and the assumption that it mobilizes people to action. Instead, the legacy of this data fetish shows that it can just as often lead to
more damage, especially to the relationships and communities on which flourishing ecosystems depend.” -- Sarah Jaquette Ray, Professor, Cal Poly Humboldt
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: About American Weather 1
1. Dreaming Data: Locating Early Nineteenth-Century Weather Data 25
2. Gendering Data: The Women of the Smithsonian Meteorological Project 57
3. Data in the Sky: Scientific Kites, Settler Masculinity, and Quantifying the Air 87
4. Data’s Edge: Cleaning Data and Dust Bowl Crises 111
5. Ugly Data in the Age of Satellites and Extreme Weather 137
Epilogue: Data’s Inheritance 171
Notes 179
Bibliography 209
Index 229
