The Animus of Cloud Seeding: Voluminous Extraction and the Earth’s Atmosphere as Vertical Farm

The literature on vertical and voluminous spaces analyzes primarily the lithosphere and the biosphere as spaces of extraction. However, ethnographies of cloud seeding can introduce a new perspective on extraction from the sky. In the UAE, the state exerts its vertical sovereignty by extracting from below, through its well-known oil industry, and, in recent decades, from above, through a thriving cloud-seeding program, the UAE Rain Enhancement Program. Using three years of ethnographic data, as a UAE-based anthropologist, I argue that ethnographies of cloud seeding engage concepts of obliqueness, voluminous remains, vertical state control, and territorial referentiality. The logic of rain enhancement presents clouds as a reserve of water, referencing water security, and by extension, national security. This enables territorial claim over atmospheric depth, making verticality a tool for state control. Rain enhancement actors in governance, science, and the industry frame the atmosphere not as inert space, but as voluminous, resource-rich matter, integrated within capitalist circuits.