Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy

In 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 national weather project and to a notion of the nation itself, demonstrating that weather science's impact cannot be reduced to a set of quantifiable phenomena.

Author: Sara J. Grossman
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 08/25/2023
Pages: 264
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.14lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d
ISBN13: 9781478020059
ISBN10: 1478020059
BISAC Categories:
- Science | Earth Sciences | Meteorology & Climatology
- Nature | Weather

About the Author
Sara J. Grossman is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies on the Johanna Alderfer Harris and William H. Harris, M.D Professorship in Environmental Studies at Bryn Mawr College.