What On Earth6:44Make sweating sexy again
Author and historian On Barak says that when talking about climate change, we should be thinking less about terms like global warming and more about how we experience heat.
“The problem with the notion of global warming is that nobody really suffers from it. Global warming is an abstraction,” said Barak, a social and cultural historian of science and technology, and a professor in the Middle Eastern and African history department at Tel Aviv University.
Barak’s new book Heat: History Lessons from the Middle East argues for a social science lens on discussions about climate change, in addition to the usual scientific, and sometimes overly clinical way we talk about it.
“Temperature rise happens alarmingly quickly over a century, yet several fractions of a degree annually is not something human experience can register,” he writes.
Instead, he argues that it would be more useful to think about direct experiences as a result of the changing climate, such as heat and cold waves, droughts, floods and storms.
He also points to lessons taken from the Middle East, where people have historically developed many methods to deal with the hot, dry conditions that could help us in modern times.
Turning up the AC
When the sweltering summer heat becomes unbearable, the first thing many people do is turn the air conditioning setting up. Barak is one of many experts who say this only contributes to climate change, making things worse in the long run.
“Air conditioning is perhaps the best example for a vicious cycle, because this device relies on electricity that in turn requires combusting fossil fuels. So you end up heating the world in order to cool your room,” he told CBC’s What on Earth.
Air conditioning is an important tool to help people keep cool and cope with high temperatures, especially for vulnerable people who cannot easily leave their homes.
But the overreliance on this technology ultimately contributes to climate change, because it runs on fossil fuel-powered electricity, and contains refrigerants called HFCs or hydrofluorocarbons, which can cause far more global warming per kilogram than carbon dioxide.
AC is pervasive, and not just in the Western world. For example, Barak says Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, which was intended to be a green city of the future, has indoor air temperatures as low as 16 C.
Mohamad Araji remembers those buildings’ frigid settings. He lived nearby the Masdar City region while working at Abu Dhabi University as a professor.
“When we were walking outside, [then] coming into the building, there is this thermal shock that you get, and it wasn’t very comfortable,” he said. He had similar experiences while living in Arizona.
“Honestly, it’s not quite healthy,” he said, noting that he saw people often keeping jackets or heavier clothing just for the indoors.
Passive cooling architecture
Over centuries, humans have learned how to build structures and high-tech devices to help mitigate heat.
Middle Eastern architecture incorporated passing cooling such as the mashrabiyas — wooden screens that looked like intricate lattices, which let in the air flow but obscured enough sunlight to prevent the indoors from heating up. The lattices have inspired newer designs such as the Al Bahr Towers in Abu Dhabi, whose exteriors are covered in modular solar panels that open and close in response to the movement of the sun.
Other passive cooling designs include wind towers that catch the hot outdoor winds and move them closer to the ground, cooling that air.
Araji noted that some of these tools might not be best suited for buildings in Canada. Even though passive cooling designs might help during the summer months, they wouldn’t be helpful during the winters, when thick walls that keep the cold air outside are necessary.
Those rules might change over time, though.
“I think slowly, slowly we’re moving into considerations of like passive strategies that relate to both heating and cooling conditions,” he said.
Not every solution needs to be high-tech or architectural: other tactics included putting pitchers of water near windows to cool a breeze as it entered a room; occasionally sleeping on rooftops at night; or the quylula, a midday break in the workday for a restful, cooling nap.
It’s cool to sweat
Other times, the best heat coping mechanism may simply be embracing a natural bodily function: sweat.
“Sweating, which we now generally, outside maybe of very particular places such as the gym, we loathe; we may find disgusting. But in the 19th century, in the Middle East, sweating was encouraged … by diet, by spicy foods, by hot mint tea or a robust cup of coffee,” said Barak.
“And it was something attractive. Women would be attracted to men and their sweat. Men would be attracted to men and their sweat — sweat is a recurring theme in homoerotic poetry.”
Some Ottoman poetry even ascribed devotional value to sweat, saying that the Prophet Muhammad’s beads of sweat fell to the earth when he ascended to the heavens, from which red roses grew out of the ground.
Sweating was embraced between the Middle Ages and 19th century, Barak writes, because it was thought to expel toxins from the body. When those theories eroded, sweat was seen primarily as a way to regulate heat — something that technology, including air conditioning, could do instead.
It was also an indicator of class. For example, being a sweaty person may imply a physical labourer, or not being wealthy enough to live in an air-conditioned home.
In the West, attitudes toward sweat turned sour mostly about 100 years ago, when aggressive advertising campaigns for newly developed deodorants and antiperspirants associated sweat and body odour with social exclusion, according to Sarah Everts, an associate professor of journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa and author of The Joy of Sweat
She agreed that the prevalence of air conditioning may have contributed to making sweating even more taboo than in decades past.
“I think we have come to the conclusion somehow that we should be able to control how much we sweat and dial it all the way down to zero, and that that’s the optimum place of, like, what’s considered normal is zero sweating,” Everts said.
Barak admits that the tactics he discusses shouldn’t be seen as perfect solutions to a problem as pervasive as climate change. But even thinking differently about how we cope with the heat — including reconsidering how low we set the air conditioner settings — are an important step.
“Just broadening our horizons to other possibilities, to other dispositions … and romantic and devotional and theological attitudes to sweat might at least offer some kind of beginning to remind us that we could do things differently.”