Abstract
Among natural phenomena, the 1997–98 El Niño event received an extraordinary amount of print and electronic media attention around the world, surpassed only recently by the coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The social and cultural processes that interacted on multiple scales as the 1997–98 environmental event unfolded allow interpretation, from a range of theoretical perspectives, of how global phenomena acquire meaning for different actors. To examine this large‐scale event and to gain the insights it can provide into globalized environmental incidents more generally, the authors trace its trajectory in a single country, Peru. The 1997–98 El Niño was one of the most powerful of the century and the one most extensively forecast as well. The first official announcement that an event was developing was made by a Peruvian governmental agency in June 1997, following earlier rumors.