ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a cyclical view of time and nature articulated by many residents that challenges the ontological reality of industrial era risk and concomitant configurations of time. Natural cycles proponents read long-term climate patterns through their embodied experience of local weather. The chapter investigates themes by exploring understandings of weather and environmental change among residents highly exposed to climate change hazards in a region of intensive coal production, the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. Climate change is inevitable because it is part of the natural cycle of life and evolution, hence the occurrence of previous ice ages. In a time of anthropogenic climate change, talks about the weather can express deeper concerns about ecological instability, mythologies of order and disorder in the cosmos, and uncertain futures. The survey comments tend to emphasise the radical Otherness of nature, but deny human capacity to control it, or at least its weather manifestations.
