The complexity of human roles and responsibilities in the health and continuance of Earth and all its life has been explored by Indigenous writers and activists from a wide variety of perspectives. Of particular importance is the profound relationship between humans and water, the fundamental compact on which all others rely. Through an analysis of literary representations of water, this chapter examines Indigenous stories that center relationships and responsibilities, recognizing the interlocking systems on which all life relies. Authors Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna), and Tommy Pico (Kumeyaay) engage these concerns by connecting characters and their current conflicts of drought and/or environmental degradation to story traditions about the perils of imbalance and the repercussions of human greed. The life of water represented by seasonal rains, drought, and dynamic waterways reminds readers of the vital roles humans and the more-than-human world play in the climate cycles that support environmental wellbeing.

Scientific advances of the nineteenth and early twentieth century meant climate began to be understood as something to be measured and described technically; yet the supposed objectivity of this scientific discourse became inseparable from the subjectivity of social comment and prejudice. With its interest in putting different discourses in tension, Modernist writing is well suited to challenge these conceptions, and the growing literary recognition of under- or unrepresented communities saw a diversity of cultures being written. While Modernist writers such as Stein and Stevens complicated easy assertions about the social effects of climate, Southern and African-American writers including Faulkner, Hurston and Hughes contested generalized or racially inflected climatic theories. It is the economy rather than environment that places the figures of American Modernist literature in their privileged or precarious positions, which only then determines whether they can exploit or are subject to the climate. Such writing reveals the limitations and failures of technical and economic understandings of the environment, troubling them with personal and bodily experience of weather.

“Climate and Race” begins with a scene from Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), considered in the context of scholarship on urban heat islands, to make evident one crucial mode in which anthropogenic climate and racial grouping intersect now and will do so going forward. That established, the chapter then jumps backward in time, to the early modern period, and works gradually forward, to witness the long history of how people in Europe and America theorized the intersection of climatic and human variety. In distinction from what geneticists now contend about the ways that racial categories fail to correlate with miniscule genetic variations between human groups, and in distinction from ancient and early modern theorists who believed that bodies were so porous as to be composed differently by different environments and changed as they relocated, the most consequential modern race theorists gained traction by attending to bodily surfaces, and defining them as indexes of invisible and immutable features underneath. The chapter traces the ways in which this modern concept developed and how climate featured as an aspect of, and at times as a counterpoint to, this history of thinking.

This chapter examines connections between climatic determinist accounts of civilization and the tendency toward climate reductionism in recent writings on climate change and future societal collapse. It examines the writings of a sequence of key historical figures, notably, Hippocrates, Ibn Khaldūn, Montesquieu, and Buckle. Thereafter the work of a range of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American writers including the chemist-historian John William Draper, geographers Ellsworth Huntington and Ellen Semple, and medical practitioners William Petersen and Clarence Mills are reviewed. Scrutiny of their pronouncements reveals the intimate connections such figures perceived between climate and health, wealth, war, eugenics, temperament, and civilization more generally. The essay foregrounds continuities between these proposals and the writings of some contemporary commentators on climate and economics, and on the implications of climate change for the future of human society.

The Anthropocene tasks literary critics and historians with rethinking literature through the lens of a civilizational catastrophe not yet fully realized but well-modeled and forecast in the IPCC reports, which describe a future planet drastically altered by greenhouse gas emissions. The hidden angle of literature is that it has always subtended a long arc from a mostly stable climate regime to the chaotic one that awaits above 400-plus ppm. Within literary texts we may find clues to explain how, in the face of a planetary emergency, we persist in our frustrating denialism (and find, too, perhaps some remedies for it). The American Renaissance is an important locus for such rereadings. This essay takes an indirect line through the central figures associated with the period (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Hawthorne), adding Dickinson, Poe, Fuller, and Susan Fenimore Cooper. The remarks on these authors’ “climate-imaginary” are mostly observational, sometimes notional, and admittedly provisional. Uncovering the climatic unconscious of the American Renaissance can only be understood as a literary version of paleoclimatology, with all the attendant gaps and uncertainties.

Prior to bacteriology, miasma theory advanced a climatic theory of health: vapors carrying disease were understood to be exacerbated by heat and humidity, and their dispersal changed depending on weather patterns. The story goes that germ theory corrected miasma’s mistakes, shifting attention away from humid, malodorous air and toward a new comprehension of the role played by microorganisms. But, in fact, a number of American writers resisted this paradigm shift. As these writers saw it, the dénouement of miasmatic depictions of disease heralded an evisceration of a familiar grammar of climatic reflexivity, which they felt compelled to retain and recuperate.

The US West has long evoked fantasies of climatological stability: the aridity of the Southwest; the soggy Pacific Northwest’s endless rain; the “humid fallacy” that Mike Davis has argued inaccurately overlaid a Mediterranean climate onto Southern California. Davis' derivation from a uniformitarian geological model is less apposite for the earthquake-prone landscape of Southern California than the dramatic alternations of a catastrophist sensibility. Davis thus points not simply toward a more accurate description of the material conditions of the US West, but to the narrative rhythm of its climate, which unfolds across long stretches whose consistency challenges narrative interest until punctuated by the sudden violence of a shift in weather. Alongside two other central figurations of the US West – the Garden of the World and the Great American Desert – this chapter tracks this rhythm through western American literary history.

Under the pressure of climate change and other global environmental crises, a new disciplinary coalition between historians, literary critics, social theorists, and artists has emerged in the twenty-first century under the banner of "environmental humanities. "This essay explores the disciplinary changes involved in this discursive and institutional shift, highlighting the elements of older environmentalism that have faded or been significantly changed by the newer paradigm and tracing the novel research lines emerging from climate studies. The possible generative conflicts within environmental humanities are reviewed.

The ascendancy of new materialist theory in the humanities since the turn of the century parallels the rise of anthropogenic climate change as a central political concern. This is not a coincidence: climate change exposes the limitations of both social constructivism and scientific realism. This essay examines the new materialist approaches to climate change proposed by Bruno Latour, Astrid Neimanis, and Rachel Walker Loewen. In Latour’s account, the categorical distinction between nature and culture has prevented climate science from openly embracing the political task of assembling a new polity encompassing both human and nonhuman entities. Neimanis and Walker Loewen, on the other hand, argue that the abstract quality of climate science is the principal reason for society’s failure to respond to anthropogenic climate change, and suggest that it must be reconceived in terms of concrete entanglements between human and nonhuman bodies. In placing their emphasis on embodied experience, however, both approaches fail to account for the rhetorical frames and the larger dynamics of communication that shape how climate change becomes socially relevant.

The crisis of anthropogenic climate change, bad enough in isolation, is made worse by the hegemony of neoliberal, free-market economic orthodoxy. Almost everywhere the idea of “the market” reigns supreme, like an angry god demanding constant deference and tribute. The essential problem is this: Neoliberalism is hostile to the idea of economic planning and redistribution; it maintains that the market is largely self-regulating, but adapting to and mitigating the worst of climate change will require robust and active states.

The crisis of anthropogenic climate change is made worse by the hegemony of neoliberal, free-market economic orthodoxy. Almost everywhere the idea of “the market” reigns supreme, like an angry god demanding constant deference and tribute. The essential problem is this: Neoliberalism is hostile to the idea of economic planning and redistribution; it maintains that the market is largely self-regulating, but adapting to and mitigating the worst of climate change will require robust and active states.

This chapter reads the late nineteenth-century genres of American naturalism and regionalism through the prism of climate, and finds that their authors depict characters whose characteristics are shaped by their responses to their ambient environments, including climate, and by the inherited effects of their ancestors’ adaptations to theirs. It argues that their thinking about climate was informed by the popular Lamarckian science of their post-Darwinian evolutionary era, by the climate theory of the historian Hippolyte Taine, and by turn-of-the-century geography. In the decades during which Frank Norris, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Hamlin Garland were at work on questions of determinism and/or a “determined indeterminacy,” climatic, genetic, medico-psychiatric, and sociological models of identity vied for authority. The writers drew their representations of the making of Americans from these competing claims.