Following from local social and cultural conditions, meteorological events are perceived differently which influence how such phenomena as weather and climate are understood. Since certain understandings can be considered obvious, it can be hard to accept the validity of different understandings. In this essay I explore how Matsigenka people in the Peruvian Amazon view atmospheric events and how their comprehensions form part of their overall understandings of the world and the various forces therein and how their knowledge serves them in their engagement with the environment. Matsigenka people’s notion of the world is then compared to notions central to modernist science and, given the differences, the two modes of seeing the world are obviously incompatible. Despite the radical differences they both provide what are considered relevant explanations to occurrences in the environment by their respective advocates. The dominance of modernism in most aspects is however taken to justify the imposition of modernism’s perspective on that of others and thus alternative realities are colonialized creating an ethical problem that modernism’s complacency leads it to ignore.