last updated 17th March 05
by 4ecotips.com

New book puts new perspective on things

P D Smith writing in The Guardian says today it’s not just the British who are obsessed by the weather, but the whole world. Lucian Boia’s timely book – The Weather in the Imagination - places current concerns about climate change into context and shows that people have ben anxiously studying the sky for portents of doom since the beginning of history.

In the Andaman Islands of the Indian Ocean, hit by the recent tsunami, thunder is the voice of God and the hurricane is his anger.

The biblical tradition of flood goes back to an ancient Babylonian text, possibly inspired by a tsunami in the Gulf. Boia thinks there is a “human propensity for catastrophism” and sees climate fears as expressing anxieties about rapid social change.

Does this explain our worries about global warming?

Boia manages to stay firmly on the fence about this. And the outlook? His “cultural history of climate” is dry in places but has plenty of illuminating interludes.

The Weather in the Imagination by Lucian Boia. (Published by Reaktion price £14.95)