The Colonial Climate tells the story of how San Diego built and branded itself during the last 175 years as the finest climate in the world. Drawing on the stories of settlers, scientists, politicians, businessmen, artists, and soldiers, it illustrates how the region’s dry, sunny climate was not what attracted migrants and investors to San Diego so much as it was the grandiose dream of reinventing the region as a greener, wetter, and cooler one. Beginning with the U.S. conquest of San Diego in the Mexican American War (1846–48) and continuing through the onset of global warming, The Colonial Climate travels across colonial science, colonial aesthetics, and colonial economics to demonstrate the ways in which San Diego’s climate was geoengineered by historical actors in word and in fact.
Bob Johnson advances the term “colonial climate” to describe the reinvention of nature at the micro- and macro-climatological levels through colonial activities over time and space. In this work, he resituates climate as an object of knowledge within colonial practices that remade nature as a physical entity and that reshaped people’s experience of nature. Pushing the boundaries of climate science and contemporary political debate, The Colonial Climate moves us beyond the static language of climate change and global warming to reveal the historical processes involving race, class, nation, and gender that generated the onslaught of problems we are facing today.