The Colonial Climate - by Bob Johnson (Hardcover)

About the Book

Bob Johnson explains how Anglo American settlers, developers, soldiers, scientists, and politicians remade the Southern California climate over 175 years through the importation of colonial models of thinking, acting, and planning.

Book Synopsis

The Colonial Climate tells the story of how San Diego built and branded itself during the last 175 years as the finest climate in the world. Drawing on the stories of settlers, scientists, politicians, businessmen, artists, and soldiers, it illustrates how the region's dry, sunny climate was not what attracted migrants and investors to San Diego so much as it was the grandiose dream of reinventing the region as a greener, wetter, and cooler one. Beginning with the U.S. conquest of San Diego in the Mexican American War (1846-48) and continuing through the onset of global warming, The Colonial Climate travels across colonial science, colonial aesthetics, and colonial economics to demonstrate the ways in which San Diego's climate was geoengineered by historical actors in word and in fact.

Bob Johnson advances the term "colonial climate" to describe the reinvention of nature at the micro- and macro-climatological levels through colonial activities over time and space. In this work, he resituates climate as an object of knowledge within colonial practices that remade nature as a physical entity and that reshaped people's experience of nature. Pushing the boundaries of climate science and contemporary political debate, The Colonial Climate moves us beyond the static language of climate change and global warming to reveal the historical processes involving race, class, nation, and gender that generated the onslaught of problems we are facing today.

Review Quotes

"At once a vivid microhistory of a particular place--San Diego--and a wide-ranging examination of some of the largest problems confronting the planet today, The Colonial Climate offers a profound meditation on the relationship between humans and climate."--Karl Jacoby, author of Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation

"Engagingly written and convincingly argued, The Colonial Climate advances provocative claims: that climate has a rich social history with material consequences, that San Diego's trademark 'finest climate' was made by Anglo settlers more than it was discovered, and that the very processes that transformed the landscape into a green and pleasant place are now unmaking it, no matter how natural it came to feel. In Bob Johnson's hands, San Diego offers us a compelling new way of thinking about deeper colonial histories of climate change, past and present."--Phoebe S. K. Young, author of California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place

"In Bob Johnson's hands, San Diego offers us a compelling new way of thinking about deeper colonial histories of climate change, past and present."--Phoebe S. K. Young, author of California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place

About the Author

Bob Johnson is a professor of history at National University in San Diego. He is the author of Mineral Rites: An Archaeology of the Fossil Economy and Carbon Nation: Fossil Fuels in the Making of American Culture.