ABSTRACT
Our connections with weather have become more acute. Brought on by unpredictable meteorological turbulence raging across the globe, weather is more than ever connected to climate change. All living things have an intrinsic link with weather, yet humanity is obsessed with building-out weather. As the primary interface between humans and the planet, human civilization has refined building to seal out weather as a further way of exerting control over nature. Where early humans’ use of geological stone to advance civilization evolved to characterize an inner and outer ‘geophilia’, by the 20th century, weather became ‘pictorial’, viewed behind plates of glass, heated and cooled, driven through on highways dissecting landscapes, and surrounded in the pressurized capsules of aircraft cabins—technology as a built interface between humans and weather. Even as the climate disasters seen in the 20th century have become more frequent in the 21st century, weather is still something to contend with rather than be at one with. Human connections to weather have also transferred in one way or another to human relations with animal and plant life: religion was one way, colonialism and superiority were others. This chapter explores human relations with plant and animal species and asks how we might learn from their processes of metamorphosis and environmental adaptation in an era of catastrophic weather events as one step towards achieving global sustainability.
