Faculty Favorites: (Re)Imagine Environmental Futures with These Books, Films, and Exhibits
The world is changing quickly—from the rapid breakdown of US systems of democratic governance to the equally quick ascendancy of artificial intelligence around the world, and, of course, to the extreme ecological and climactic shifts transforming the face of the earth. In this rapidly changing present, the specter of the future looms large—at once a source of hope and of terror, an aspiration and an inevitability, a motivating, energizing force and a paralyzing, suppressive one.
How do relations of power constrain our imagination of the future, predetermining some possibilities and foreclosing others? And how does our prediction of and fixation on the future direct our gaze and contour our values in the present? Beyond a temporal framework, “future” is an pliable, power-laden and power-granting concept.
We invited scholars from a range of fields to share books, films, and exhibits that they are most excited to read/view and teach in the new academic year on the topic of environmental futures and futurity. Their recommendations span from science fiction to documentary, imaginative poetry to historical exhibit. Between these recommendations, we hear from a fishing community in the Caribbean, oil workers in Canada, artists, novelists, and academics, all of whom resoundingly demonstrate that whose vision of the future resonates is an urgent question of justice.
Leida Fernández Prieto, Senior Research Scientist, Instituto de Historia of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) (Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales)
Recommendation: Cuba: Living between Hurricanes directed by Michael Chanan and written by Jonathan Curry-Machado (Amaurea Press, 2021)
Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes is a documentary filmed and directed by Michael Chanan in 2019. In 2021, historian Jonathan Curry-Machado, one of the screenwriters, edited a book based on the documentary.
The documentary and book address the long-term impact of cyclones, rainfall, the sea, and the land in Cuba. Both examine Cuba as a “model island” through which the legacies of colonialism and capitalism can be traced and linked to the elements. They explore the high economic and environmental costs of Cuba’s economy. Long based on the export of tropical goods such as coffee, sugar, and tobacco, Cuba’s economy has transitioned to a tourism-based economy. The documentary and book explore this transition, from a “Sugar Island” to a “sun and beach” island, in the fishing community of Caibarién, located in central Cuba.
Against the growing threat of climate change, interviewees propose ecotourism, reforestation, and sustainable agriculture as solutions. However, many of these initiatives face serious challenges in the context of the deep crisis the island is currently experiencing.
Leida Fernández Prieto is the author of Cuba agrícola: mito y tradición (1878-1920) (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2005) and “Islands of Knowledge: Science and Agriculture in the History of Latin America and the Caribbean” (Isis, 2013).
Stefania Gallini, Assistant Professor of History of the Americas, Università degli Studi Roma Tre
Recommendation: Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500 by K. Crawford and J. Vladan (2023)
I first encountered Calculating Empire online and found it overwhelmingly dense and irresistibly attractive. When I had the chance to see it as a 24-meter-long visual manifesto at the Biennale of Architecture in Venice in August 2025, I confirmed both impressions.
This piece of art and design is a condensed, interpretative, historically suggestive, and visually powerful timeline and map of the intertwined history of power, technology, and social control from 1500 to the present, viewed from a Western perspective but with a global outlook. It is organized on a Cartesian plane around two main themes: communication and computation, control and classification. Each theme is explored through topics that serve as the watermark of the entire project. Together, they address the idea that technological devices and systems are partners to systems of power. Modern and contemporary history have been shaped by empires exerting their power through ideas, devices, and structures.
In horizontal reading, you follow topics through time; in vertical, you explore topics more deeply. More a map than a timeline, this digital and printed fresco assembles an astonishing range of visual and written sources, from historical images of objects and artistic creations by Serbian co-author Vladan to quotations and titles.
The other author, Kate Crawford, is well known for her book Atlas of AI (Yale University Press, 2021), a must-read in critical AI literature. Her perspective on AI is visualized here as an octopus floating through seasons: a first summer (1956-73), several winters, up to the current summer (2010 onward). But more generally, AI emerges from Calculating Empire as woven into a complex system of power where planetary mineral Cold War, environmental inequities, and algorithmic bureaucracy are just different faces of the same coin. In an academic world of fragmented knowledge, this modern fresco offers an engaging and brave challenge.
Stefania Gallini is a co-author of “Humanidades Digitales ‘a lo colombiche’: cadáver exquisito de la Red Colombiana de Humanidades Digitales” (Revista de Humanidades Digitales, 2020) and author of Una historia ambiental del café en Guatemala. La Costa Cuca entre 1830 y 1902 (AVANSCO, 2009), Elinor Melville Best Latin American Environmental History Book, 2010.
Jessica Hurley, Associate Professor of English, George Mason University
Recommendation: “The Heat Death of the Universe” By Pamela Zoline (1971)
I teach Pamela Zoline’s short story “The Heat Death of the Universe” every fall in my Science Fiction class. The world of Zoline’s story is one of spreading ecological destruction: superhighways extending outwards from the story’s geographical heart in California, taking over the world through metastatic infrastructures of concrete, plastic, and cancer-causing toxins.
The work of protagonist Sarah Boyle, housewife, is the maintenance of this spatial ordering system at the household level. As the title of the story suggests, however, entropy is the natural order of things; the imposition of order by the household and the environmental brutalism writing itself across the planet must, in this story’s environmental futurism, inevitably fail.
In Zoline’s particular combination of science and fiction, it is language that enacts this uncontrollability: Sarah Boyle tries to lock everything down by labeling it, but the hand cream still ends up labeled “CAT.”
As we wrestle with the psychic and material harms of living in what seems to be a closed system of unavoidable ecological disaster, this story reminds students that the anarchic qualities of language still function to crowbar open closed systems and create unforeseen possibilities for environmental futurities.
Jessica Hurley is the author of Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex (University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
Caren Irr, Kevy and Hortense Kaiserman Professor of English, Brandeis University
Recommendation: Limits to Growth by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William Behrens III (Potomac Associates, 1972)
Back in 1972, when computer modeling was less common than it is now, the Club of Rome sponsored an international team of researchers at MIT. This group used five factors to project possible futures for the planet: food, industry, population, natural resources, and pollution. They pulled these together in several scenarios and optimistically concluded that planners and policy makers still had time to avoid the worst outcomes. Their term for the worst outcome was “overshoot” or a situation where the resources necessary to sustain the world’s population were inadequate. Written in clear, manageable prose, their results were published as Limits to Growth and the volume became a huge bestseller, translated into more than 30 languages.
After thirty and fifty years, the group updated Limits to Growth, assessing the merits of their own modeling and–more importantly–the prognosis for future development. Since the 1990s, they have gloomily concluded that the world now inhabits an overshoot scenario, and their data projects some possible ways that scenario might continue to develop.
This is a fascinating project for futurists and those interested in the relationship between data-driven and imaginative treatments of environmental crisis.
Caren Irr is the editor of Environmental Futures: An International Literary Anthology (Brandeis University Press, 2024).
Susie O’Brien, Professor and Chair of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
Recommendation: The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry by Melanie Dennis Urau (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024)
Left unexamined in techno-optimist visions of a bright, energy-efficient future fueled by renewables is the question of who will steer that future, for whose benefit—a question Melanie Dennis Unrau takes up in The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry. Focusing on twentieth and twenty-first century poetry by Canadian workers in the oil industry, the book situates itself in a moment of overlap between the hegemonic imaginary of “petropoetics” and the culture of colonial and capitalist extraction underlying it, and the push towards energy transition. What this transition will look like is yet to be determined, Unrau notes, but the link between transition and justice is not guaranteed.
The book explores oil worker’s poetry as a window into this period of upheaval. While it punctures the air of sanctimonious distaste that shrouds the industry in a country that oil-worker and poet Lesley Battler calls “the gentle colony/of bitumen worshippers,” the book is far from a petro-cheerleader. It trusts its subjects, the worker-poets, not just as creative writers and reliable narrators of their own experiences, which include stigma, precarity, ambivalence and displacement (many workers in Alberta’s tar sands come from the Maritimes), but also as theorists of petropoetics attuned to the challenges of climate justice.
I am excited to include the book’s excellent introduction alongside the work of several of the poets it has introduced me to in the syllabus for my undergraduate environmental humanities course as well as my graduate course, “Revolt and Remember: Resilience in the Environmental Humanities.”
Susie O’Brien is the author of What the World Might Look Like: Decolonial Stories of Resilience and Refusal (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024) and a co-author of “A History of Environmental Futurity: Special Issue Introduction” (Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2017).
Jamie Pietruska, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Recommendation: Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology by Liliana Doganova (Princeton University Press, 2024).
Discounting the Future is an extraordinary achievement, with brilliant ideas and fascinating details on every page. Sociologist Liliana Doganova argues that discounting—calculating how much a cost or a benefit in the future is worth in the present—is a multivalent, controversial political technology that we should be deeply concerned about.
With technical specificity and moral clarity, Doganova reveals how discounting came to dominate business and government in the twentieth century, becoming a generalized framework for seeing the world through the lens of investment. As a calculating technology, discounting is widely used today to determine what is valuable, what is worth creating, who should get what resources, and how humans should make decisions about possible futures.
This book is brimming with ironies and unintended consequences that result from how discounting is presented as a solution to problems it helped create or make visible. In particular, Doganova demonstrates that discounting has had extraordinary consequences for how humans understand their relationship to time itself and therefore how it has fueled climate (in)action and other issues relating to sustainability and justice.
Doganova provides a critical lens with which to reconsider the presence and power of discounting in our daily lives along with a moral imperative to imagine alternative futures and ways of valuing them. Anyone interested in finance capitalism, futurity, and the politics of value—and anyone living on this planet and trying to imagine a way forward in our climate emergency—should read this book. It will change how you see much of the world around you and how you imagine possible futures.
Excerpted from Jamie Pietruska’s full review of Discounting the Future in Finance and Society (2024).
Jamie Pietruska is the author of Looking Forward: Prediction & Uncertainty in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
Michael Rawson, Professor of History, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York
Recommendation: The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth (originally published by Ballantine Books, 1953; revised edition published by St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011)
Two years before his death in 2013, the great science fiction writer Frederik Pohl made some light revisions to The Space Merchants, a classic work of science fiction that he had co-authored with C. M. Kornbluth back in 1953. Pohl wanted to update the book for the twenty-first century by changing a few of the corporate names to more familiar ones. He need not have bothered. The students in my course on The History of the Future find the book a brilliant satire, a perceptive extrapolation, and a painfully relevant portrait of tomorrow even without the present-day references.
Often considered one of the best science fiction works of all time, Space Merchants introduces readers to a consumerist future where capitalism runs roughshod over the planet, advertising agencies control the world’s governments, inequality grows ever more extreme, and environmentalists are treated like terrorists—and it is all done with a sense of humor. I look forward to re-reading the book every time I teach the course.
Michael Rawson is the author of The Nature of Tomorrow: A History of the Environmental Future (Yale University Press, 2021).
Featured image: A man wearing virtual reality goggles. Photo by fauxels, 2019.
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