Elements. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2022. x, 246 pp. (Figures, B&W photos.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 9781478017806.
As our planet enters what may be among the hottest years on record, and global warming kills residents through heat waves and floods, destroys the built environment with hurricanes, and forces climate migration from Alaska and Vanuatu alike, our societies continue to make choices that negatively impact our world. Yuriko Furuhata’s densely written, deeply researched new book serves as a kind of x-ray machine on the deeply embedded, normative behaviours in the United States and Japan that persist in taking lives and wrecking our cities. The very common and mundane act of making our apartments, offices, and stores more comfortable for habitation through air conditioning, for example, raises the ambient temperature and creates urban heat islands, forcing us to use more electricity to further condition our air in a vicious feedback loop. So too by creating sealed environments where crops can grow even in very cold climates, researchers have unwittingly opened the door to rapid colonial expansion, as Japan did when its greenhouses and other agricultural technologies allowed farmer-colonialists to make deeper inroads into the challenging environments in Manchuria, Sakhalin, and other international territories (84). We have created biochemical imbalances in our farmland soils forcing us to manufacture fertilizer, and petrochemical firms such as Japan’s Chisso Corporation were directly responsible for widespread and deadly industrial pollution, such as the methylmercury poisoning among residents living near their factory in Minamata (116).
The core contributions of Climatic Media come from its “task of tracing loops” (23), that is, of the qualitative investigations bringing together seemingly unrelated processes to push us to reflect more deeply on them and their connections. This explication, which Furuhata defines as “bringing something that had remained in the background of consciousness to foreground” (168) provides a way for her to study diverse phenomena from—among other topics—the fields of cooling, art, architecture, and policing.
Following the Introduction, chapter 2 looks at fog sculptures, air conditioning, and forecasting, illuminating the connections between fog as an artistic element, a cooling technology, and as cloud computing. Chapter 3 covers greenhouses and architecture for extremely uninhabitable locations like the Arctic and outer space, tracing the roots of the Tange Lab (a community of scholars that figures into several other elements of the book). Chapter 4 looks at the consequences of industrial capitalism, focusing on plastics and the “metabolic rift” formed by our dependence on that material in architecture and throughout many of our everyday products. Chapter 5 illuminates “cloud control” through a focus on air conditioning and social conditioning (through tear gas). The Conclusion ties together several of the points made earlier but, interestingly, ends with a focus on methodology, namely, how fields such as media studies should be more self-critical and reflexive in practice.
This project makes some powerful points. For example, as policymakers debate in the summer of 2022 whether we should engage in geoengineering projects which either reflect sunlight (through processes such as expanding cloud cover or building more mirrors, white roofs, and solar panels) or draw in carbon dioxide (through carbon sequestration projects or tree planting schemes), Furuhata reminds us that past scientific endeavours have led to the weaponization of weather as the United States did during the Vietnam War (35). Whose hand is on the thermostat is not a rhetorical question (15) and it is clear that a superpower—likely the United States, Russia, or China—will be among the first nations to attempt a large-scale manipulation of the earth’s climate to counteract global warming. So too when considering advances in science, Furuhata argues that the Japanese and American “scientists, architects, engineers, and artists” involved in the creation of new technologies and their subsequent application to war and peacetime, uses demonstrated “political complicity” (166). We have seen this complicity turn a blind eye to wrongdoing as well in the work of managers at manufacturing firms like Boeing which sacrificed safety for profit (as depicted in Peter Robison’s 2021 book Flying Blind) and in workers at technology firms like Meta which allowed for the manipulation of its users by foreign countries and by those who would undermine democracy and sway elections.
A final argument I appreciated is Furuhata’s critical interrogation of the term resilience which has made its way into the lexicons of academia, local governments, and multinational firms alike (175). While we may assume that resilience is a normative and desirable outcome, we may forget about the need to consider what the term resilience indicates—who is being resilient to what, and why those shocks and crises exist in the first place. Her line of thought should push those of us studying resilience (as I tried in my earlier work Building Resilience, University of Chicago Press, 2012) to reflect more intently on these questions.
As with any research project, some parts raise additional questions. The book’s claim that we should expand the term “media” to incorporate a fairly broad spectrum of phenomena (including “the materiality of elements that condition our milieu,” [3]) will likely find pushback among media studies scholars; I believe that the book stands on its own without it. Further, it is not a book for a casual reader seeking an empirically testable hypothesis or for introductory undergraduate courses looking for light prose.
Despite any shortcomings, the book is an important contribution to our understanding of many aspects of Japanese epistemic communities, the US-Japan alliance, and our current predicament of global warming and potential, man-made solutions. Hopefully, it will help our responses become more thoughtful.
Daniel P. Aldrich
Northeastern University, Boston