The perceived color of the sky is determined by three interrelated factors: sunlight composed of many different wavelengths, molecules in the earth’s atmosphere that scatter light, and the sensitivity of the human eye. Conventional wisdom holds that the characteristics of sunlight and the atmosphere are an immutable fact of nature. However, China’s government has engaged in a campaign that seeks to control local meteorological conditions to produce blue skies on command, a phenomenon referred to here as “blueskying.”

Writing on the heels of the First World War and at the advent of the Irish War of Independence, William Butler Yeats used the concept of the gyre as an unstoppable, terrifying dynamic force. A gyre, in his poem, destabilizes the relation between human and nonhuman others, beginning as an aerial vortex and expanding to an oceanic “blood-dimmed tide.”

First deployed in West Queensland, Australia, Alphabet’s (formerly Google) Project Loon is flying balloons—essentially elevated cell phone towers—over Indonesia to provide internet to those who do not have it or cannot afford it. The Indonesian government is working with Alphabet as well as funding the start-up company Helion to make Indonesia a world leader in the use of balloons to deliver the internet.

‍Sovereignty has long extended through the thermal world. The manipulation of heat fueled industrial production and transportation, expanding the reach of national and colonial forces. The labor of bodies has been managed through the deployment of food and the implicit regulation of metabolisms, as well as the mass thermal communications of air conditioning. The boundaries of cities, nations, and empires have been enforced through thermal violence, whether the dumping of indigenous people on the frozen prairie or the blasting of prisoners with water cannons in subzero temperatures.

People in Nicaragua with a form of progressive renal failure called chronic kidney disease of non-traditional causes (CKDnt) talk in volumes about their condition. I don’t mean that they go on and on about their aches and pains. Most of the thousands of CKDnt patients in Nicaragua were sugarcane plantation workers until they got sick.