Sam Keller

Rain

A Natural and Cultural History

Cynthia Barnett

Every culture had its own way of worshipping rain, from Mesoamerican cave paintings exalting rain deities to modern Christian governors who call prayer for a storm
The water vapor accumulated in the upper atmosphere for so long that when the surface finally cooled enough for the rains to touch down, they poured in catastrophic torrents for thousands of years. This was the picture the Stanford University geochemistry professor Donald Lowe painted for me when I asked him to imagine Earth's first rains.
We imagine that a raindrop falls in the same shape as a drop of water hanging from the faucet, with a pointed top and a fat, rounded bottom. That picture is upside down. In fact, raindrops fall from the clouds in the shape of tiny parachutes, their tops rounded because of air pressure from below.
Climate change frightens and divides us, to such an extent that many people simply refuse to talk about it all. But everyone loves to talk about the rain. Too much and not enough, rain is a conversation we share. It is an opening to connect— in ways as profound as prayer and art, practical as economics, or casual as an exchange between strangers on a stormy day. Rain brings us together in one of the last untamed encounters with nature that we experience routinely, able to turn the suburbs and even the city wild. Huddled with our fellow humans under construction scaffolding to escape a deluge, we are bound in the memory and mystery of exhilarating, confounding, life-giving rain.
To the east, the rugged Cascades stretch in a startling line of volcanoes from British Columbia all the way to California. As air crosses the coastal mountains and descends into the lowlands of western Washington and Oregon, annual rainfall decreases, from more than 100 inches a year to between 25 and 45 inches. This rain shadow covers an urban corridor from the Canadian border all the way to Eugene, Oregon— making Seattle and Portland drier than any major city on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, with 20 inches less rainfall than Miami, 5 less than New York and Boston.
Christians have long prayed for storms to relieve parched land in dry times. Jews and Muslims do as well. Jews around the world pray for rain each year on the eighth day of Sukkot, the pilgrimage festival that celebrates the harvest
Many religions and cultures came to view the rain, itself, as male
Religions hold a mirror to the history of humans and their complicated worlds, including their beliefs and perceptions about climate. The monotheism of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all grew out of the arid sands of the Middle East. Some historians trace monotheism to agriculturalists in these dry lands looking to the skies for life-giving rainfall. Most of the polytheistic religions were born in the soaking monsoons. Some scholars speculate that as people evolved their belief systems in radically different climate conditions, they took radically different approaches to interacting with God, nature, and one another. “In the wilderness of the desert, where life struggles to survive, it would seem logical that a divine being would be responsible for the creation of living things out of nothing, and that in due course time and life will end in a final day of judgment,” writes the geoscientist Peter Clift, who studies the Asian monsoon and its human impacts. “In contrast, in the forested land that has grown under the influence of summer monsoon rains, life is everywhere and abundant. Tropical forests teem with life and the cycle of birth, life, and death are endlessly replayed, resulting in a theology that does not emphasize a beginning or end of creation.”
Indeed, in a host of religious traditions, from Allah fracturing clouds into raindrops in Islam to Buddhist rain-cloud kings, rain is among the most important blessings possible. In Judaism, rainfall is said to be one of life's greatest events, greater even than the giving of Torah.
Yet rain continues to defy Big Data— routinely washing out zeropercent predictions as well as the pronouncement by the former Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson of “a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear.” What's fascinating about high-tech rain forecasts is the degree to which they are improved by human meteorologists like Stephens. National Weather Service statistics show meteorologists improve rain-forecast accuracy 25 percent over computer guidance alone.
The disaster led Doesken to launch a network of volunteer rainfall observers, known as the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network, who take rain gauge readings at home and report them over the Internet. What began as a small local project has grown to 30,000 weather watchers around the United States who are building a database of highly local precipitation measurement
The U.S. military made its first large-scale attempt to unleash rain as a weapon during the Vietnam War. Beginning with trials in 1966, and continuing every rainy season until July 1972, “Project Popeye” dropped nearly fifty thousand loads of silver iodide or lead iodide in the clouds over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to induce heavy rains. The idea was to flood out roads, cause landslides, and make transportation as difficult as possible well beyond monsoon season— essentially, to keep the Ho Chi Minh Trail a muddy mess and foil North Vietnam's ability to move supplies and personnel.
The House and Senate ultimately adopted anti-weather-warfare resolutions. In 1977, the United States, the Soviet Union, and other nations ratified a UN treaty prohibiting military “or any other hostile use” of environmental-modification techniques
Utah, California, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas all engineer clouds, as do many local governments, agricultural consortiums, and other rain-dependent businesses. A couple of hydroelectric companies in the United States and Australia have seeded clouds for more than fifty years without interruption.
From California to Florida, the era of federal flood control— along with America's plumbing half the continent to pipe freshwater to arid cities— profoundly changed the human relationship with rain. Building against rain instead of with it had devastating consequences for the coasts. An estimated 85 percent of Los Angeles is urbanized, 65 percent of it paved over—sealed by impervious surfaces. Every subdivision and shopping mall, parking lot and pancake house prevents rain from soaking back into the ground. The rain that used to find its natural course to the aquifer or sea is now channeled, given a new name— “stormwater”— and poisoned as it rushes over dirty streets and down gutters
But the most profound illogic is that South Florida regularly contends with drought emergencies even while surrounded by freshwater— trapped as it is in berms, canals, crop furrows, culverts, dams, dikes, ditches, pipes, plants, reservoirs, runnels, sluices, storm ponds, tanks, weirs, and wells. The fast-growing cities in the region overtapped the aquifer and now scramble to build costly drinking-water plants even as the Everglades plumbing flushes 1.7 billion gallons of rainwater to sea every single day.
In Seattle and all the cement-suffocated cities of the world, restoring hydrology can reduce harm. Seattle is at the forefront of a rain revolution that gives floodwaters more natural places to drain, replaces impervious surfaces with porous ones, and clears rain's pathways to aquifer and sea. Like many revolutions, this one began in the streets— actually along the edges, as engineers and landscape architects replaced concrete curbs and drains with grassy swales, and planted hundreds of trees and shrubs to help filter and slow the flow of stormwater
Some of the tales of black rains of ash and pulverized pumice that Fort collected from Europe could be attributed to Mount Vesuvius in Italy. The volcano erupted five times in the second half of the nin
Some of the tales of black rains of ash and pulverized pumice that Fort collected from Europe could be attributed to Mount Vesuvius in Italy. The volcano erupted five times in the second half of the nineteenth century. But chemists linked the greasy rains that could turn a white sheep black to the soot emanating from the manufacturing cities of northern England and central Scotland— then cranking out Mr. Macintosh's double textures and other textiles, along with a choking grime that blackened the air in London, in Manchester, and beyond. Simply put: The more pollution we pump into the atmosphere, the dirtier the rain.
Regulation— especially a cap-and-trade program that lets coal-burning power plants buy and sell emissions permits— has helped reduce the sulfur dioxide released into the atmosphere by more than half. Twenty-five years ago, 18.9 million tons spewed into U.S. skies annually. Today it's well under 8.9 million, the government's cap.
Whether bringing a river to flood stage or washing fertilizer into the Gulf of Mexico, there's nothing destructive about the rain itself. Only we have made it so. We plowed up the native grasses, settled the floodplains, and built out our cities as if immune to the workings of rain. Today, flooding has become one of the foremost increasing risks of a warming climate.
As Powell said in his Arid Lands report so long ago, “the weather of the globe is a complex whole, each part of which reacts on every other, and each part of which depends on every other.” Who could have imagined, in the eighteenth century, a pollutant spewed into the air by Mr. Macintosh's rain-cloak factory in Manchester could help cause a major human health disaster in the Great London Fog of 1952... and then destroy Germany's beautiful Black Forest with invisible and deadly acid rain... and then alter the climate of the Earth?
In the story of rain and humanity, never entirely just and harmonious, the most shameful injustices took place amid fear and desperation during extreme drought and extreme storms: the sacrifice of children to the rain god Tlaloc, the burning of witches at the stake for conjuring tempests. As Earth throbs with the most extreme rains and droughts of the modern human experience, it is worth remembering those most irrational responses of our stormy past.
I thank Orion magazine and managing editor Andrew Blechman for the opportunity to write about water in Seattle, work that made its way into several of these chapters. The Seattle rain artist Buster Simpson is a font of information and inspiration.