Summary: Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Thomas Ford Although the phrase has not yet appeared in print, the cultural history of climate change is increasingly being recognised as a vital site of interdisciplinary interest. The reinterpretation of British Romanticism is essential to this emerging field, because atmosphere itself was constructed and functioned as a medium of communication in this period, linking culture and climate in new ways. In Modern Painters 3, John Ruskin defines Romanticism as the moment when the atmospheric mediation of perception and communication become central to art and literature. This corresponds, Ruskin claims, to a new awareness that visual and literary art use different media. Only once atmosphere is understood as a medium, that is, do other media (text and image) become visible as media themselves. Via a reading of Ruskin and Romanticism, this paper rethinks the material history of media with reference to today’s sense of ecological crisis and to Mark Hansen’s recent definition of ‘medium’ as ‘an environment for life’. Thomas H. Ford completed his PhD at the University of Chicago in British Romanticism. He has taught literary studies at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his translation of Boris Groys’s The Communist Postscript was published by Verso in 2010.
