Meinig Lecture: Global Geographies of Weather Modification in an Era of Climate Change

Emily Yeh of the University of Colorado Boulder will present this year’s Donald W. Meinig Lecture, “Global Geographies of Weather Modification in an Era of Climate Change.”

As climate change impacts intensify, interest in the practice of cloud seeding to induce precipitation and otherwise modify the weather is on the rise around the world. Geography offers powerful analytical tools for understanding the practice of cloud seeding and the controversies it has created — including thinking geographically about the hydrosocial cycle, culture-nature binaries, volumetric geopolitics, and the need to take indigenous world-making practices seriously. The talk compares weather modification in the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and China, showing that their practices and rationales are shaped quite differently by political economic, institutional and socio-cultural contexts.

The Professor Donald W. Meinig Undergraduate Lecture honors the pivotal geographical work of Maxwell Professor Emeritus Donald W. Meinig, a member of the Syracuse University Geography Department from 1959 until his retirement in 2005.