Historians looking for precedents for the study of the human impacts of climate change have focused on theories of “climate determinism,” an ancient assumption that climate inescapably molds human bodies, temperaments, and ways of life. Their histories rightly warn against this way of thinking, which risks perpetuating racist and sexist stereotypes and inhibits what geographer Mike Hulme calls “contingent, imaginative, and humanistic accounts of social life and visions of the future” (2011, 245). Yet historians have missed the alternatives to determinism that have thrived on the periphery of professional science.

Today’s mainstream science frames the consequences of climate change in terms of discrete local “impacts” that can be extrapolated from global models. Implicit is the assumption that change begins on the global level, setting the parameters to which local communities must reactively adapt. In my forthcoming book, Stewards of the Sky, I argue that this framing of climate as hazard has left its mark on the science and policy of climate change in ways that mask the potential for bottom-up change. In its place, I propose to adapt the early modern concept of “influence,” which better describes the variability of experiences of climate change and the promise of coordinated local action.

The anthropologist Tim Choy (2021) describes living with climate change in terms of “conspiring,” the literal meaning of which is breathing with. To me, this is a reminder that the atmosphere is not subject to human control; it is, however, amenable to coordinated influence.

Etymologically, the word influence denotes an inflow of fluid or air. When the word was first used to describe the power of one person over another, the presumption was that this “action at a distance” was mediated by the atmosphere, via heat, light, or motion. The seventeenth-century poet John Milton wrote of “Ladies, whose bright eies Rain influence,” explaining influence as an atmospheric effect. In a similar vein, a seventeenth-century naturalist thanked his patron by likening his botanical studies to a plantation that “will depend much upon the continued influence of Your Beams,” alluding to the role of sunlight in producing a fertile harvest. As these examples suggest, early modern writers typically imagined that influence operated in support of existing power structures. And yet one person’s influence over others was understood to require the cooperation of the atmosphere.

The word atmosphere dates to this same era. It originally referred to the maximum height of vapors rising from the earth, a quantity subject to considerable debate in the early 1600s. Atmosphere soon came to refer to effluvia emanating from bodies most generally, such that all living beings and inanimate objects could be said to exude their own atmospheres. Atmosphere was thus a term for how bodies influenced each other, sending out and receiving each other’s emanations. This moral meaning inheres in metaphorical uses of “atmosphere” today, as in a “hostile” or “friendly” “atmosphere,” even as we tend to forget the word’s etymology.

What would it look like if we reframed climate adaptation in terms of but in terms of the atmosphere’s ‘influence’? Influence better captures the multiple spatial and temporal scales and mutuality of the interactions between climate and life. It does justice to the cascading and unpredictable effects of a warming atmosphere as it transforms landscapes, livelihoods, bodies, minds, and social relations. Influence underscores our agency as socially embedded actors even as it reminds us of the limits of human control. It captures the impossibility of fully disentangling the harm caused by warming from the harm caused by other injustices. In the case of a famine, for instance, it doesn’t force us to choose between blaming fossil-fuel polluters and holding local officials accountable. Influence is always multi-causal and multi-scalar.¹ It might seem perverse to suggest that a way of speaking four hundred years old has relevance to our era of climate change. Surely we no longer think in terms of the same hierarchies of influence as did Milton and his contemporaries, nor do most of us imagine that every person produces their own atmosphere, nor that people influence each other by means of invisible fluids. If we look to existing histories of the science of weather and climate, we find no evidence that the idea of atmospheric influence held sway after the seventeenth century.

I propose that the study of atmospheric influence has remained hidden to historians for two reasons: first, because this research has often been directly at odds with mainstream science’s ambitions of prediction and control, and second, because its practitioners have often stood on the margins of the scientific community. Yet the history of atmospheric influence merits our attention because of the clues it holds for developing a science of the atmosphere as a global commons.