Delmarva Today 5-14-21
Climate scientist and professor of geography in the Department of Political Science and Geography at Old Dominion University, Dr. Michael Allen is Harold Wilson’s guest. He discusses the impact climate change has on our weather.
There are a number of great weather events in literature that serve to swell a plot and bring out emotions and attitudes we experience through their reading. In her novel Their Eyes were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston fictionalizes the 1928 hurricane in south Florida in the following paragraph:
The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.
The hurricane, “woke up old [Lake] Okechobee,” she writes, “and the monster began to role in his bed. Began to roll and complain like a peevish world on a grumble.” The flood that followed the peevish monster killed more than 2,500 people. Belle Glade, Pahokee, South Bay and other communities were devastated. Huddled in their shanty in the Everglades, Hurston’s characters, “seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.” Watching God, fate, the void fearing what this totally arbitrary, uncontrollable, and impersonal event might do to them.
Weather can do that to us. Climate is the earth’s personality and weather is its mood, according Dr. Allen. The capricious changeability of this mood is the stuff of literature and art. And it is the environment in which we live. What impact does climate change have on its mood?