Weather Incorporated: Environmental Education, Postmodern Identities,and Technocultural Constructions of Nature

Abstract

In this essay I examine some of the ways in which nature is textualized in technocultural discourses, with particular reference to the incorporation of satellite-based weather monitoring and digital imaging technologies into global consumer markets of information and entertainment. I argue that these discourses not only construct and mediate our day-to-day experience of weather, but also help to produce our identities as actors in the world by regulating the social and cultural practices through which we interact with nature. I suggest that critical readings of popular media representations of weather, such as those I provide here, are a necessary part of an approach to environmental education that recognizes and problematizes our participation in the cultural narratives and processes that produce our understandings of "nature" and "culture" and mediate their interactions.