Lea Schick is the editor and moderator of this debate forum. During the RETHINK exhibition she will facilitate the RETHINK NATURE discussions here on her blog. We will very much encourage you to participate in the debate! 

The clouds are not what they seem to be

“If we are serious about our need to rethink human relations with nature […] a good starting place might be to step outside and take a good long look at our suffering sky, a now largely man-made layer dense with emissions” (Hamblyn)

The clouds have long functioned as symbols of many things from a calm and romantic summer day to a forecast of weather, and who doesn’t enjoy lying in the grass finding figures in the clouds?

But the clouds might not be as innocent as they seem to be. In his article Antropogenic Skies, Richard Hamblyn explains how clouds recently changed due to human intervention and global warming, and how cloud formations not only tells us about the weather – but they also reveal climate changes and affect the climate as a whole.

What role will the clouds get to play in the future of climate change? The research area is still very new, and whether the amount of clouds will increase or decrease due to the rising temperatures of the oceans is not clear. The scientists still argue about if the new man-made skies and changing formations and extent of clouds will have a heating or a cooling effect on the climate of the Earth. What should we think when we look up at the sky and see a cloud looking like a big hand? 

Hamblyn's recent book on clouds 

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Contributions for RETHINK NATURE

 

ABOUT RETHINK NATURE

Discussions about climate change often seem to be centered around the concept of nature as ‘the Other’ – something that is outside of us. Sometimes lost, sometimes distant, often something we have left behind, and something to which we should perhaps return, in one form or another. But thus nature is also something, which we have been largely able to happily forget over the course of our industrial revolutions, and to omit almost entirely from consideration in conventional human planning and development.

But the reality of climate change – a force of Nature so all-pervasive and profound in the severity of its realized and projected effects that it is compelling us to rethink practically every aspect of life on our planet – makes this romanticization and idealization of ‘Mother Nature’ difficult to maintain, and demonstrates that our perception of any meaningful distance from nature is shockingly illusory. We have not returned to nature; nature is returning to us, forcing us as it did our ancestors to transform our methods of devising and executing every sphere of human existence. When we can (un)intentionally change the weather, when water and air are commodities that we can own, and when the very climate has become a subject of intense political debate at every level, then nature again becomes a complex and ambiguous phenomenon.

How does climate change force us to rethink our notions of nature? And how does our perception of nature affect how we deal with climate change? Through a number of articles approaching different aspects of what we call ‘nature’, we encourage you to share your opinions and thoughts with the writers and with other interested.

 

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