Inquiry

We live in a time of global warming, environmental degradation, and radical transformations in the Earth’s ecosystems to the extent that life for future generations will become increasingly difficult. We also live within a history of human-inflicted ecological catastrophes, displacement, forced settlement, and rupture from traditional land-based knowledges resulting from colonization—a history and present in which Indigenous peoples and those living in the Global South are already bearing the effects of climate breakdown. When we organize to attempt to prevent and mitigate the direst effects of climate change, we must also ask: How is the future differentially distributed? Or, as Kyle Powys Whyte asks: who has already experienced apocalypse, and what can we learn from histories of cancelled futures? Whose futures are being valued over others? Can we organize to resist the cancellation of collective futures from a position of solidarity and hopeful resilience? We find promise in a range of tactics and approaches: coordinated strike and protest actions; divination; science fiction and time travel; Black and Indigenous futurisms; calls-to-action for rematriation; hacktivism, sabotage and refusal.