Sabine Wilke, Department of Germanics (Chair), University of
Washington Narrating Climate: German Culture in the Age of
Environmentalism Narrating climate constructs a historical
framework for understanding discourses on environmental change
as the result of transactions and negotiations between global
forms of imagining a shared sense of (world) community and local
models of regional politics. The German environmental
imagination was born in the context of scientific discovery
(Alexander von Humboldt) and continues to shape fictional
narratives of climate and climate change today. The trajectory
of this discursive construct spans two hundred years of literary
and rhetorical figurations of the figure of the German scientist
actively involved in global transactions, researching
atmospheric phenomena and other scientific parameters related to
climate, translating these data visually into mathematical
models, charts, images, and projections, and lecturing about
his/her conclusions (often in other languages and t