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

"Immeasurable Weather demonstrates how the quantitative data produced by American weather scientists as well as citizen scientists has reinforced the project of settler colonialism and altered the living environment in the process. Sara J. Grossman argues that white settlement of the land and domination of its people proceeded by breaking up the complex networks of relationality that bind together the human and non-human worlds. Erasing the relational models of ecology that form the basis of Indigenous environmental knowledge, the emergent discipline of data science-born specifically from the desire to quantify weather-instead reproduced the natural world and natural phenomena as a set of isolated objects to be measured, owned, and exploited. Immeasurable Weather explores the relationship between climate data and state power in key moments in the history of American weather science: the public data-gathering practices of settler farmers and teachers in the 19th century that would later form the basis of the United States Weather Bureau; the centrality of women to data collection and computation, particularly through the Smithsonian Meteorological Project; the automation of weather data in the Dust Bowl of the early 20th century; and, finally, the role ofmeteorological satellites in data science's formal integration into American "military-meteorological nation-state structures.""--

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.

Sara J. Grossman explores how weather data collection has been central to the larger project of settler colonialism in the United States between 1820 and the present.