Most droughts go unnamed. At the time they are happening, they are generally referred to simply as “the drought.” After the fact, they are typically designated by a year or run of years rather than by a name: 1927–29, for instance. But in recent decades, proper names have increasingly been bestowed on droughts in southeast Australia in an informal although widely accepted practice. Examples include the Federation Drought, the World War II Drought, the Millennium Drought and, most recently, the Tinderbox Drought. This paper positions the practice of naming droughts within a longer history of naming weather extremes. It examines the implications of the naming practice for the investigation of droughts as complex objects of interdisciplinary knowledge that call for analysis from across the sciences, social sciences and humanities. And it considers the qualities and meanings attributed to the drought of 2017-19 by the name “Tinderbox.” Using the word “tinderbox” to describe environmental conditions has been criticised for naturalizing landscape flammability and so effacing human agency. But in fact the name “Tinderbox Drought” potentially enacts a semantic reversal that allows human-caused climate change to be reassociated discursively with recent and future drought events.

中文翻译：

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命名干旱：关于“火药箱干旱”科学创造的历史观点


大多数干旱都没有命名。在它们发生的时候，它们通常被简单地称为 “干旱”。事后，它们通常由年份或年份而不是名称来指定：例如，1927-29 年。但近几十年来，澳大利亚东南部的干旱越来越多地被赋予专有名词，这是一种非正式但被广泛接受的做法。例子包括联邦干旱、第二次世界大战干旱、千年干旱以及最近的 Tinderbox 干旱。本文将干旱命名的做法置于极端天气命名的较长历史中。它研究了命名实践对干旱调查的影响，干旱是跨学科知识的复杂对象，需要来自科学、社会科学和人文学科的分析。它考虑了 2017-19 年干旱的品质和意义，名称为“Tinderbox”。使用“火药箱”一词来描述环境条件一直受到批评，因为它将景观的易燃性自然化，从而抹杀了人类的能动性。但事实上，“Tinderbox Drought”这个名字可能是一种语义上的反转，它允许人为造成的气候变化与最近和未来的干旱事件重新联系起来。