Our Climate – a Cultural-Historical View

By Laura Anninger

Literature cannot stop climate change, says ECH Member Eva Horn, a literary and cultural studies scholar at the University of Vienna. Yet, it can teach us much about how climate has always shaped human perception. We talked to her about insights from a humanities perspective.

ECH Editorial Team: I climbed the Großglockner, the highest mountain in Austria. At an altitude of 3,798 meters, breathing becomes more difficult. In that moment, I became acutely aware of the air around me. Have we lost this awareness in our daily lives?

Eva Horn: Indeed, we do not notice the air around us unless we are directly confronted by it. We have desensitised our senses. The saying goes, “there is no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.” This reflects our modern understanding of climate: climate as an abstract political issue, and weather as a trivial conversation topic.

ECH Editorial Team: Can the perspectives of history and literature on climate and air teach us anything relevant today?

Eva Horn: They introduce us, first of all, to a different worldview: a worldview where humans had a much greater awareness and sensorium towards nature. Johann Gottfried Herder stated that culture arises where humans engage with their climate. By draining swamps and cultivating fields, they altered their local climate, which in turn changed them. Such theories highlight the interplay between culture and nature, showing how different eras or cultures linked their moods, health and social life to climatic and meteorological conditions.

ECH Editorial Team: What were historical perceptions of climate in different epochs?

Eva Horn: Until the 19th century, climate was primarily understood as a geographic location profoundly affecting human health and lifestyles. Hippocrates wrote about “airs, waters and places” in the plural. The old concept of climate was akin to what we now call “environment.” People did not think of a single climate but rather an infinite variety of climates.

So, people believed that cultures, local customs, and even mentalities or social institutions were linked to their specific climate. Cultures described themselves as shaped by the specific climate of their location. Climate was seen as a common factor uniting all inhabitants of a place, forming a shared identity.

ECH Editorial Team: This means that climate was believed to have a strong influence on people?

Eva Horn: From antiquity to the 17th century, humans were seen as beings that reflect the divine order of nature, a microcosm mirroring the macrocosm. According to the ancient theory of elements, the world is composed of air, earth, water and fire. Humans reflected this balance through their four bodily “humours” as well as through their life stages and character.

Interestingly, the four-element theory (air, earth, water and fire) somehow reappears in today’s concept of the Earth system, composed of the interplay of spheres: the atmosphere (air), hydrosphere (water), lithosphere and biosphere (earth), all driven by the sun’s “fire.” Modern biomedicine, as well as other disciplines, increasingly recognises how deeply our bodies are shaped by our environment.

ECH Editorial Team: What about modern humans today?

Eva Horn: Historically, humans saw themselves as in constant engagement with their surroundings, from the landscape to the cosmos. Weather and seasons shaped them. Today, we see ourselves as detached from cosmic cycles, local conditions and the balance of the elements. The early modern scientific revolution taught us to view nature not as an interconnected system we must fit into, but as mere matter governed by immutable laws. We now consider ourselves independent and free to exploit nature’s resources and make use of its stocks, so to say, as we please. Fossil fuels have made energy perpetually available, detaching us from nature’s cycles and the limits of growth dictated by seasons and natural regeneration.

ECH Editorial Team: In the 21st century, we have vast amounts of data on climate and the environment. Why has this knowledge not turned everyone into environmentalists?

Eva Horn: It is challenging to connect deeply with something represented by a complex mass of data. Modern meteorology, which defines climate as global “average weather” rather than a local habitat, has made climate a statistical issue. While this has enhanced our understanding of the atmosphere’s physics and chemistry through data, it has distanced us from experiencing weather and climate first hand. Alexander von Humboldt was a pioneer in this field. The aims were reliable weather forecasts and total predictability of capricious atmospheric currents. An example is Jules Verne’s novel Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), in which the protagonist navigates easily between different layers of air in a hot-air balloon. It epitomises the 19th-century optimism that believed everything could be controlled through thorough research.

Today we know a lot more about the dynamics in the atmosphere and their connection with the oceans and the biosphere. Nevertheless, we still do not have completely reliable weather forecasts. Although we can model future climate, we can hardly really predict it. It is all much more complex than we initially thought.

ECH Editorial Team: How does the history of science relate to this?

Eva Horn: Over the past 400 years, nature has been reduced to a backdrop. The scientific revolution in the early modern period increasingly viewed nature as a mere mechanism external to human social and intellectual life – as “mere matter”, a “basis”, a “resource”. As something that is basically dead and available. Animals were seen as reflex machines without consciousness – a notion we have only begun to challenge in recent years. This worldview persists in our current understanding of nature, even when we talk about “protecting nature”. The idea of a world at humanity’s disposal, a world that will regenerate itself and is ‘opposed’ to humans, is now being severely questioned. On the one hand, we see how heavily dependent humans are on other organisms, from insects to soil life to our own microbiome. On the other hand, the Anthropocene concept tells us that human activities profoundly disrupt the planet’s self-regulation, with potentially unimaginable consequences for the state of the planet, like the weakening of the Gulf Stream.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses says: Everything changes, nothing perishes. Nothing is really ever truly gone, not our rubbish, not our technologies, not the changes that humans make to landscapes and biotopes. All other living beings leave behind something that other organisms utilise. We are the only living organism that does not recycle.

We are building a world around us that is no longer degradable, that will still be visible in the Earth’s crust millions of years from now.

ECH Editorial Team: Does the concept of ‘solastalgia’ – the distress caused by environmental change or destruction – resonate with past experiences?

Eva Horn: Of course. But what is the use of labelling this insight a psychological condition today? We are altering the world on a planetary scale, often without realising it. Despite years of scientific warnings, we struggle to believe what we already know. We might need a psychological term for our massive ignorance.

ECH Editorial Team: Is ‘climate anxiety’ a more accurate term?

Eva Horn: Who really has ‘climate anxiety’?
It is often attributed to children but it is not a form of anxiety but rather a rational assessment of the present situation, not something to be psychologised. We face a material problem, where we are rather part of the problem than the solution, where we are both perpetrators and victims.

ECH Editorial Team: Which terms do you find useful?

Eva Horn: The term ‘technosphere’ is helpful. Among the various spheres – hydrosphere, cryosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere – the technosphere stands out, relying on materials and their embedded energy. This term clarifies that we change the Earth not with our hands but with our technologies, which are also becoming increasingly autonomous.

ECH Editorial Team: Do you learn from colleagues in the natural sciences?

Eva Horn: Absolutely. At the Environment and Climate Research Hub, colleagues are doing incredibly interesting work in their fields. As someone approaching nature from a humanities perspective, it is crucial for me to engage with natural scientists, learning not only about their latest findings, but also about fundamental mechanisms, methods and concepts. Sometimes, we also must agree to disagree in discussions. We work with very different perspectives, methods and terminology, and it is very important to talk about these differences. But our goal is the same: to better understand and communicate what is currently happening.

In our book on the Anthropocene, Hannes Bergthaller and I aimed to reflect on scientific findings from a humanities perspective, seeking to foster dialogue among natural, social and humanities disciplines, which was extremely rewarding. This dialogue is essential to grasp what is happening today. Fortunately, interest in such interdisciplinary exchange has grown significantly among natural scientists in the last 20 years. We need a collective input of knowledge from various voices in society to jointly tackle these urgent issues.

ECH Editorial Team: Thank you for the interview.