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Moral cargo

Assuming responsibility for the future
by
October 2024, no. 469

The Empire of Climate: A history of an idea by David N. Livingstone

Princeton University Press, US$38 hb, 544 pp

Moral cargo

Assuming responsibility for the future
by
October 2024, no. 469

The birth seasons of the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates may be one of the few details of the nominees that have escaped close scrutiny in the lead-up to November’s election. Such a neo-Hippocratic political analy-sis might also consider their general body types, genealogies, dispositions, and partners, according to the approach of a 1943 study, Lincoln-Douglas: The weather as destiny. Written by a Chicago physician and professor of pathology and bacteriology, William F. Petersen, the meteorological biography of Abraham Lincoln and his political opponent Stephen Douglas sought to make the case for the causal climatic forces on the political trajectories of its protagonists. Lincoln’s success was apparently thanks to his slender physique and ‘better equilibrium with the environment’.

The Empire of Climate: A history of an idea

The Empire of Climate: A history of an idea

by David N. Livingstone

Princeton University Press, US$38 hb, 544 pp

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Comment (1)

  • The pure contrarianism of one player telling another not to be too alarmist about climate change, while urging the same player to drive sweeping changes through our economic and political and technological systems is at best mildly amusing.

    Granted, though, this book offers a valuable prompt to consider more deeply the centrality of climate: A number of papers now point to the likelihood that the pandemic was in origin a climate event.
    Posted by Patrick Hockey
    30 September 2024

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