Desiring the Weather: El Niño, the Media, and California Identity

Marita Sturken

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

Don DeLillo, White Noise

Weather is not what it used to be. It is no longer something one goes outside to register, that one experiences on the ground and in the flesh. It has become, rather, a technological experience, seen from satellites and endlessly monitored on television and the Internet. What was once the site of interest for farmers and fishermen has become the source of pleasure and obsessive viewing for urbanites and suburbanites. What was considered to be a boring, uneventful news item has become a primary, if not quintessential, aspect of contemporary cable television. What was understood as a natural phenomenon is now the source of technological fantasy.

Yet, weather fascinates precisely because it appears to be a stable phenomenon of history. The turn of the millennium is defined by technological change, political upheaval throughout the world, economic volatility, and the increased globalization of culture. This postmodern and postindustrial experience is accompanied by an anxiety coupled with optimism not unlike the modern experience at the last turn of the century. In this context, the weather is a source of fascination precisely because of the comfort it can appear to provide—comfort at the unchanging routine of rain, clouds, and sunshine interrupted by an occasional weather event. The weather’s capacity to be both tremendously mundane and spectacularly dramatic is key to its emergence as a source of viewership pleasure. Within the gaze of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century technology, the weather has been transformed from a simple indicator of natural forces into a phenomenon of entertainment. Today’s weather is not to be experienced so much as watched and consumed.

The primary events that have signaled the new weather as entertainment have been the particularly severe hurricane seasons of the 1990s, which produced significant damage on the East Coast; the El Niño of 1997–98, followed by La Niña, which began in 1998 and dissipated in 2000; the rise of the Weather Channel as a staple of cable television; and the spate of weather books in the late 1990s for armchair disaster watching, such as Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm (which became a film in the summer of 2000) and Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm—both of them about catastrophic storms—and Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear, an analysis of Southern California as the site of weather, natural, and social disaster.1

Of these events, the El Niño of 1997–98 was perhaps the most anticipated, thanks to new technologies of measuring water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, and it was the event most centered on California. In this essay, I focus on this particular El Niño event in the broader context of the new construction of the weather. Termed “the climate event of the century,” the 1997–98 El Niño produced a rash of predictions, anxieties, commercial ventures, and dire warnings about the potential demise of the California coastline. As such, it revealed not only the construction of weather as entertainment but also the role played by the weather in a liberal discourse of political denial. The media coverage of this El Niño event made visible the weather’s function as a site for desire, both displaced desire in its many forms and the desire of the spectator’s gaze. The embrace of El Niño as an event of meaning demonstrates the ways that contemporary discourses of weather serve to alleviate contemporary postmodern anxieties about fragmentation, rapid social change, and lack of meaning.

Controlling the Weather: The Rise of Weather Media

Throughout history, the relationship of humans to the weather has been dictated by narratives of control. Weather has long been understood as the primary symptom of nature, the way that nature speaks to its occupants. Nature has been defined historically in both religious and gendered terms, with centuries’ worth of analogies of nature as female and science/technology as male.2 Natural disasters have been understood as the result of man’s fall from nature, and hence a form of punishment, as well as the work of an unforthcoming and vengeful female nature.

One of the primary narratives governing the weather is that of revenge. Originally a Christian narrative about the weather as a punishment for sins, this story has evolved in contemporary environmental politics into the weather as nature’s anger at humans for all the ills they have perpetrated upon it.3 The idea of nature’s revenge thus provides a contemporary secular theme for the weather: nature’s “fury” is aimed at the negligence and indifference of humankind toward the environmental consequences of its actions. Its current manifestation is the compelling argument that the weather upheaval of the late twentieth century is the result of global warming caused by pollution.

Control of the weather has often been understood in terms of replicating its actions. Much of the scientific understanding of weather has come from experiments of simulated weather, which range from, for instance, Francis Bacon’s sixteenth- century attempts to artificially create snow, rain, and hail under experimental methods to contemporary computer simulations.4 However, narratives of the weather ascribe to it particular powers of spectacle and viewership precisely because it is understood as uncontrollable. A fascination with chaos theory’s “butterfly effect”—the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings over China can affect the development of winter storms over the Atlantic Ocean a few days later—indicates the thrill of weather as an unpredictable force. The fantasy of controlling the weather by actually changing it has never been realized, and it is precisely this uncontrollability that situates the weather as a site of displaced desire.

Controlling the weather also takes the form of measuring its activity, defining its source, and naming it. Within nationalist discourses, weather is most often defined as coming from elsewhere. In the western United States, weather is understood to come from the Pacific and Asia, and in the Midwestern and eastern states, it is seen to arrive from an undifferentiated territory above the border (otherwise known as Canada). The naming of weather phenomena (whether for climate variations, such as El Niño and La Niña, or for hurricanes and typhoons) and the creation of logos (Storm Track 97, El Niño Watch, and so on) serves to domesticate and familiarize weather. In the case of El Niño, the name gives this periodic event of warming Pacific waters a dynamic personality, one it cannot maintain when it is defined by science with its other name, ENSO: El Niño- Southern Oscillation.5 The name El Niño comes from nineteenth-century Peruvian fishermen, who noticed that fish became scarce as waters warmed off the coast in December. Because of this occurrence at Christmastime, the fishermen termed this phenomenon “El Niño,” which is Spanish for the Christ child (and more generally for a male child). The warm ocean conditions are not only associated with this effect on fishing but also with more general effects on weather conditions, often causing rain in dry areas and drought in normally wet climates. In most years, El Niño’s impact is limited to the western South American coast, but larger El Niño systems move north and cause changes in weather systems worldwide—among other things, bringing winter storms and cold temperatures to Southern California. La Niña refers to El Niño’s reverse, with waters cooling off the Pacific coast and producing equally unpredictable changes in weather. A La Niña followed the 1997–98 El Niño into 2000 and was referred to as El Niño’s “ornery” little sister.6

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Notes

Thanks to Dana Polan and Lauren Berlant for insights on an earlier draft, to Dean MacCannell for helpful comments at an American Studies Association panel, to Caitrin Lynch for editorial advice, and to Anu Mandavilli for research assistance. Research for this paper was funded by the James Irvine Foundation and the Southern California Studies Center (SC2) at the University of Southern California. Thanks to Michael Dear and SC2 for this support.

1. Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men against the Sea (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997); Erik Larson, Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History (New York: Crown, 1999); Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998). Wolfgang Petersen directed the film version of The Perfect Storm (2000).
2. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980).
3. See Langdon Winner, “The State of Nature Revisited,” in The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 127.
4. . Merchant, The Death of Nature, 185. The techniques of weather observation actually have a much longer history in China, where there are weather records dating as far back as 1216 B.C. In particular, the Chinese understood early on the relation of the moon to the tides. See Colin A. Ronan, Science: Its History and Development among the World’s Cultures (New York: Facts on File, 1982), 167.
5. . In 1966, Jacob Bjerknes, a scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, discovered the relationship between the El Niño effect of warming Pacific waters and the Southern Oscillation, which is a change in the air pressure between the eastern and western Pacific. The term ENSO thus refers to the combination of both effects, which do not always occur together. See Joseph Moran and Michael Morgan, Meteorology: The Atmosphere and the Science of Weather, 4th ed. (New York: Macmillan College, 1994).
6. See Ellen F. Licking, “La Niña Gets Ornery,” U.S. News and World Report, 27 July 1998 (online version).
7. These predictions come from a variety of news sources, including the Los Angeles Times and Cable News Network (CNN). They were compiled on the Web site The Official El Niño Hotline of DOOM! (www.primenet.com/~rfwatts/elnino.html), which collected one thousand predictions about El Niño/La Niña by September 1998. (This site is no longer available; I last accessed it in spring 1999.)