It’s 2020. The start of a new decade is a reason to look back at how we’ve looked forward and consider how contributors to Edge Effects have imagined the future. In the essays and conversations below, scholars and activists envision new ways of living together and acknowledge the past injustices that shape possible futures for life on this planet.
—Laura Perry, Managing Editor
Building a New Future
Whether modeling future forms of living or growing plants in space, these pieces explore the politics and practical realities of breaking new ground.
Two urban geographers discuss decolonization in theory and practice, the politics of water and infrastructure, and the social sides of environmental science ...
The USDA’s National Plant Germplasm System is arguably the most important seed bank for our food supply. An agroecologist explains why it is in desperate need of attention ...
Astronauts love growing plants in space, and it turns out there are benefits for us on Earth. Botanist Simon Gilroy discusses his experiments growing cotton in zero gravity ...
Four scholars and one of the original "biospherians" offer their takes on perhaps the largest private science experiment in history ...
The rise in new, powerful computing techniques could transform a conservation sector that has grown increasingly reliant on sophisticated modeling and visualization software to make decisions about which places are worth protecting ...
Protecting Future Generations
Activists help us reject how things are done and imagine how the world might be otherwise. These interviews and essays give voice to these different futures and shed light on the histories of injustice.
The climate generation is coming of age. Sarah Jaquette Ray, author of A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, explains what older generations have to learn ...
Pediatrician, scientist, and activist Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha uncovered the effects of the Flint Water Crisis on children. Her new book tells this story and how the Flint community came together to fight environmental racism and science denial with perseverance and hope ...
Last week's IPCC report sunk the spirits of many. But one veteran activist, with no time for despair, still believes in the power of citizens ...
The fight against African American land loss isn't just about economic justice. It's about environmental sustainability ...
Two centuries ago, Ojibwe people planned for seven generations to come. Today that seventh generation is fighting for the treaty rights their ancestors established and a just, sustainable future ...
Imagining Other Futures
As someone once wrote, “write for the world you want, not the world you’ve got.” These pieces offer hope for better worlds and warnings about what’s to come.
Is the Green New Deal real or science fiction? Kim Stanley Robinson's novel New York 2140 imagines a flooded world where climate action is unavoidable ...
To some, this pig is family. To others, she's food. In a review of Netflix's Okja, a geographer explores how the film's representation of super pigs and human-animal friendships asks us to rethink our relationships with nonhuman animals. ...
How can we use the arts to decolonize our relations to the land? An artist, activist, and scholar discusses the many forms of creative resistance we can use to imagine and enact new and better worlds ...
The author of "The Mushroom at the End of the World" is back with another exploration of how humans and non-humans will make their lives in the ruins of modernity ...
Most Hollywood catastrophe films offer neat endings and the promise of a fresh start. Fury Road asks what happens when the broken world cannot be made whole ...
Featured image: The Helix nebula, a planetary nebula similar to what the Sun will produce in 8 billion years. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
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