A Delay

My excuse: I have two pieces planned that require more research than usual and I’ve been focused recently on job-applying. A plug: If you’re hiring in media or something environment-related, let me know! The upshot: Apologies for no full issue of Ecopolitics this month.

For now, a digression:

I don’t know the hard data, but July felt wickedly hot to me here in New York, the kind of heat that extracts sweat like a juice presser. But rain arrived as the month came to an end, and as I write this on August 1st, it is a moderate temperature outside and the sky is a ceiling of clouds.

Talking about the weather is usually seen as boring, a conversation topic of last resort. It has unfortunately been the crisis of climate change—bringing global heating and extreme weather—that has made the topic more salient. But weather is also the ideal form of small talk. There are interesting ways to talk about the weather, and different people talk about it in different ways. Someone might express joy (“what a beautiful day!”) or frustration (“f**k this snow”). They might be pragmatic (me: “it’s about to rain” them: “we need it”) or discuss it comparatively (“I hate the heat, but in a few months I’ll be complaining about the snow.”) To talk about the weather is to talk about yourself, an opportunity to implicitly share your personality.

Except when it isn’t. Consider this, a sketch illustrating a cultural difference from the book A Beginner’s Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer:

people don’t feel the need to smudge every moment with their signature. When it’s hot, they don’t say, “it’s warm enough to roast a chipmunk in the streets!” or “phew, it’s hotter than a squirrel on a barbecue!” They just say, “hot, isn’t it?” in exactly the same words, in exactly the same tone, so that it might be the air itself speaking, or the day. It might be no one at all.

(transcribed from this talk by Iyer, so the text may be slightly off compared to the book.)

OK, I take back the thing about heat extracting sweat like a juice presser.

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