Weathering

Abstract

At present, there are two common ways to understand the impact of industries on the environment. One of them is to abstract statistics from the real industrial pollution scene and base the understanding and decision making on those statistics. The other is to regard the images of industrial landscape as a certain type of aesthetics. Neither of these two perspectives can give us a real insight of what is actually happening around Yekaterinburg, one of the cities in the world most polluted by heavy industry, what the causes are and how they have reshaped the local life. Instead, we need a ‘transcorporeal’ perspective - a term developed by Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker. Being transcorporeal, in her essay, means to go beyond the bifurcations of nature-culture or human-weather opposition, and instead to feel the process of ‘weathering’ where human body interacts intimately with the change of temperature, humidity, sunlight resonating in our skin, veins and nerves, for a better understanding and reaction to climate change. This essay applies and adapts Neimanis’ inspiring theory of transcorporeality to the realm of industrial impacts, because climate change and industrial impacts are similar to each other, in the sense that they can both be seen as the disturbance or damage to the natural environment, where human activity has played the main role combined with the feedbacks from the ecosystem, and in return has influenced the living conditions of people. With this ‘transcorporeal’ perspective, we might truly internalize the industrial impact on the environment, and even help us be critical about our moves towards the industrial impacts.