The world is in a state of rapid change. Depending on our collective priorities and choices, there are plausible scenarios for the world’s fate in the year 2050. This is the premise of Arup’s recently published white paper, 2050 Scenarios: four plausible futures.
The first of these four possible outcomes is called Post Anthropocene by Arup. From the diagram above, the Post Anthropocene scenario is characterized by two conditions:
- Planetary health improves
- Societal condition improves
What else is there to expect if we end up in this scenario? Let’s explore further.
Utopia Among the four scenarios and the factors taken into account, a Post Anthropocene scenario is the most ideal scenario among the four. It is the scenario where humans are in harmony and the world is in a regenerative phase, almost like a utopia.
Such ideal scenarios rarely materialize fully, unfortunately. However, it is important to look into such an outcome in order as a way to align our policies in actions.
No borders The society in the Post Anthropocene scenario is characterized by a low wealth gap. Workers can pursue jobs that do more than provide them sustenance. They are paid a living wage so that they can freely explore the world and pursue knowledge.
Apart from financial resources, the future society is able to enjoy such widened horizons thanks to the drastically improved literacy rates. Cross-border collaborations in research and the sharing of knowledge are also common practices.
In a Post Anthropocene world, we have a society which values humans. Because of this, an environment that will enable them to live life to the fullest was shaped the decades preceding the year 2050.
Data-driven consciousness If 2050 ends up being the Post Anthropocene scenario, people are collectively conscious and science-based when it comes to matters involving the world.
Resources and emissions are moderated by targets. Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems update people about their carbon emissions in real-time. Agricultural practices have been improved to a level that they are truly sustainable.
This balanced planet in this scenario is made possible by a close collaboration of the world towards progress. There is a recognition among the leaders of the world that a healthy planet will also lead to healthy citizens. At the same time, they acknowledge that health citizens are also a prerequisite for a healthy planet.
Arup also predicts that by 2040, the predominance of AI on the planet will also lead to discussions about giving AI a voice. They said that this will be a controversial topic which will be dealt with a healthy discussion.
A tough challenge For us to reach this scenario a few decades from would be a tough challenge. Given the volatility of our society and the troubles the planet is currently facing, this outcome is undeniably unlikely.
So are we just to give up and enter a state of complete neglect? Not at all. As much as this scenario is one that most likely will not be attained by 2050, we can still shape the world in such a way that eventually, a Post Anthropocene scenario will be our fate.
One of the many As mentioned, the Post Anthropocene case is only one of the four scenarios that the world will end up being in by the year 2050. We have also established that this scenario is the most ideal one, characterized by a healthy society and a healthy planet.
Nearly half of the planet’s bird species are in decline, according to a definitive report that paints the grimmest picture yet of the destruction of avian life.
The State of the World’s Birds report, which is released every four years by BirdLife International, shows that the expansion and intensification of agriculture is putting pressure on 73% of species. Logging, invasive species, exploitation of natural resources and climate breakdown are the other main threats.
Globally, 49% of bird species are declining, one in eight are threatened with extinction and at least 187 species are confirmed or suspected to have gone extinct since 1500. Most of these have been endemic species living on islands, although there is an increase in birds now going extinct on larger land masses, particularly in tropical regions. In Ethiopia, for example, the conversion of grassland to farmland has caused an 80% decrease in endemic Liben larks since 2007. Just 6% of bird species globally are increasing.
Since 1970, 2.9 billion individual birds (29% of the total) have been destroyed in North America. The picture is just as bleak in other parts of the world – since 1980, 600 million birds (19%) have been destroyed in Europe, with previously abundant species such as the common swift, common snipe and rook among those slipping towards extinction. Europe’s farmland birds have shown the most significant declines: 57% have disappeared as a result of increased mechanisation, use of chemicals and converting land into crops. In Australia, 43% of abundant seabird species have declined between 2000 and 2016.
Dr Stuart Butchart, chief scientist at BirdLife International, said: “We have to stop these declines and start getting on track for recovery. Our future, as well as the world’s birds, depends on it. If we continue to unravel the fabric of life, we’re going to continue to place our own future at threat.”
The report is made up of a compendium of other studies, and because birds are the best-studied group on the planet, it gives an idea of the state of nature more generally. “Birds are useful for telling us about the state of the planet. What they say is that nature is in poor condition, lots of species are in decline,” said Butchart.
Birds are cornerstones of healthy ecosystems, so their disappearance is likely to have myriad negative knock-on effects. Hornbills, for example, disperse large seeds in tropical forests; turkey vultures dispose of organic waste, while seabirds help in the cycle of nutrients between sea and land, keeping coral reefs healthy.
The previous State of the World’s Birds report, released in 2018, found 40% of bird species worldwide in decline.
Wildfires feature more prominently in this report than previous editions, having increased and ravaged previously unaffected habitats. The succession of heatwaves, droughts and floods in recent years will lead to widespread species extinctions if they continue, researchers warn, highlighting the importance of addressing the nature and climate crises at the same time.
Growing evidence links the health of bird populations to human health. Covid-19 is a warning of what could happen if we continue to destroy the natural world, with 70% of zoonotic diseases originating in wildlife. A highly pathogenic variant of avian flu – the result of intensive farming – has driven rapid declines in some bird populations this year. More than 300 outbreaks have been reported in UK seabird colonies.
The report comes ahead of the Cop15 meeting in Montreal in December, a once-in-a-decade opportunity to create new legislation to tackle the biodiversity crisis. Butchart hopes the findings will feed into the final statement from Montreal. “The key action needed now by governments is to make sure a really ambitious and bold global biodiversity framework is adopted. We’ve got to bend this curve, so by 2030 we’re on a mission of being nature positive,” he said.
This means increasing the number and quality of protected areas, conserving remaining habitats and restoring those that have been degraded. Preventing the illegal killing of birds, managing invasive species, reducing fisheries’ bycatch and preventing overexploitation of natural resources will all help.
The report is not all gloom. According to BirdLife, between 21 and 32 bird species would have gone extinct since 1993 without conservation work. It cites the creation of a new seabird haven the size of France in the North Atlantic, estimated to protect 5 million birds.
Juliet Vickery, chief executive of the British Trust for Ornithology, who was not involved in compiling the report, said: “The fact that nearly half of all bird species are declining and one in eight is at risk of extinction reinforces the fact that we are living through a biodiversity crisis. It requires action at every level, from local to global. This carries a strong warning about the health of our natural world.”
Birds in trouble The South American harpy eagle, which stands 1 metre (3 feet) tall and feeds on monkeys and sloths, is one of the world’s largest birds of prey. It was uplisted from near threatened to vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list in 2021 because of a combination of forest loss, hunting, poaching and collisions with power lines. It has declined by 50% in 60 years.
The secretary bird, a raptor from sub-Saharan Africa, went from being vulnerable to endangered in 2020 after habitat degradation driven by the burning of grasslands and intensive livestock grazing. Birds are also captured for the wildlife trade.
The lesser florican, a species endemic to the Indian subcontinent whose males perform leaping rituals to get the attention of females, has declined by 90% in 20 years, mainly because of the loss of grassland habitats and the predation of its chicks by feral dogs. There are believed to be fewer than 1,000 mature individuals left, and it is now critically endangered.
The impressive vocal abilities of the Central American yellow-naped Amazon has made it one of the most sought-after parrots in the pet trade. It has declined by more than 80% in 30 years, mainly due to poaching and the expansion of agriculture, and as of 2022 is critically endangered.
The Bahama warbler was badly affected by Hurricane Dorian in 2019, especially on Grand Bahama, where 95% of its habitat is believed to have been destroyed. It was listed as endangered in 2020.
Excerpt:
**Clifi Will Not Save Us – Turning Narrative Theory on its Head
On climate fiction, or clifi:**
Perhaps the underlying message is that you’re supposed to entertain the reader, but more and more, I greet the question with a weary smile-grimace that reveals the skull of me that’s likely to be buried in the ground sometime in the next twenty to thirty years. The search for hope is hopeless or beside the point. Fiction can’t save us in this particular way, although it can pretend to, but if in a book a heroine survives climate crisis, this has no corresponding nexus or loci in the real world, no matter how strong the will of the reader that it be otherwise. [i]
This is one of the foremost anglophone clifi authors working today, whose work is both consistently influenced by climate crisis and who has achieved a pinnacle of literary fame, Jeff Vandermeer. As a fan of his work, I was extremely excited to read this polemic of his, published just over two years ago in Esquire. In it he traces the lineage of the term clifi and sketches its relationship to speculative fiction, expresses his thoughts and opinions on his own works and other key clifi texts of the past half century, and he critiques Amitav Ghosh, so he really doesn’t leave much to ask for.
As a scholar who works on econarratology and science fiction in particular, my attention was captured by Vandermeer’s auteurist perspective on this issue in literature, in genre fiction, in the publishing industry, and ultimately in terms of policy and lifestyle. Econarratology and unnatural narratology have offered some really interesting thoughts on how people engage with narratives, from the cultural, the material, to the cognitive turn from the work of Erin James on Postcolonial Econarratology to Jan Alber on unnartual narratology. And while various genres have their theorists and practitioners, it is those of us working in and around clifi that feel a mounting pressure to make the stories do something. Nobody that works on detective fiction is expected to prevent murders.
But as Vandermeer points out, stories don’t work that way. So here I want to offer some remarks on climate narrative more generally that pushes against the archaic idealism of calls for clifi to provide a solution for the technical issues that surround us in the form hope.
I offer that a self-consciously fictional genre cannot provide a framework for change. This is because there are all sorts of narratives that work in various ways to influence power structures, politics, and policy, and clifi must be multiply mediated through various metadiscourses to access these power structures, to become political and turn into policy. This transformation relies on methods of narrative dissemination and various registers of affective engagement. Clifi can, over time, provide a conduit for transforming empirical circumstances to artistic representations and finally to ideology, something that can provide a framework of common sense that can interface with the political and economic institutions that can actually avert climate disaster. Maybe.
Here I identify four types of climate narrative:
I want to begin with what most people likely think of when they think of clifi, especially in its speculative mode, that is, the dystopia, or as I prefer to think about it, the failed utopia. My example here is the TV series based on The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Obviously, this hellscape is no utopia for June Osbourne, but it may be for the various commanders, their wives, and so on. The TV series makes more of the climate catastrophe that haunts Atwood’s novels as we see inside the colonies. Peter Hajdu also points out that “As a cautionary tale, the 1985 novel chiefly warned about the dangers of an ideological climate and a toxic environment metaphorically, but today both that novel and its sequels solicit readings that focus on the literal toxicity of the environment which, lacking a prompt reaction, can bring about answers rather similar to what Gilead did.” [ii]
Another register of clifi that is neither utopian nor dystopian, so I refer to Vandermeer’s fiction as simply Topian, that is, the narrative takes place in a world where the climate presents challenges to characters through an uncanny flux in literary space and time, or chronotope as narratology might have it. His Southern Reach series revolves around Area X, a place of mystery and danger located in the Florida swamps that evokes the Zone of the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky’s Stalker at the same time as it references the uncanniness and ambient danger of American wetlands.
Another way of articulating climate catastrophe is through utopian literature proper, and here I want to offer Everything for Everyone, an Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072. This book, from an indie press and written in the form of an oral history, adheres to the traditional Jamesonian formula for a utopia: essentially a how-to manual, according to Gabriel Burrow.[iii] The book is way outside the mainstream With that, I want to transition to the fourth type of climate narrative I wish to investigate, the empirical. First, emergent climate narratives are those that arise from media discourse about climate events: storms, floods, and other catastrophes, but also the technological, legislative, and cultural developments around climate. While each piece of the puzzle is self-contained to some degree, emergent climate narratives cohere with one another to become grist for the mills of other narratives, including the three I list above. The other side of this empirical continuum is the institutional. These are narratives, real or imagined, that are adopted by governments, industries, NGOs, and cultural milieus. As an example, I present Shinichiro Asayama and Atsushi Ishii’s work on Japanese narratives around CCS technology. The viability of CCS as a means of solving global warming caused by carbon emissions is famously dubious, and although there is strong evidence that Japan, in particular, is not employing CCS technology at anything near a rate that could positively impact climate, the official narrative in Japanese government and industry is one of techno optimisim and techno nationalism. These metadiscourses unite in the story of CCS’s potential to mitigate climate change with the fantasy of leaving the fossil fuel industry intact, uniting environmentalists and capitalists in the myth of a technological curative granted to a uniquely industrious people.[iv]
This narrative is indispensable to these institutions precisely because the technology is not working – clifi that is doing some actual lifting. How this works is partially disclosed by Saskia Brill in their article A story of its own: creating singular gift commodities for voluntary carbon markets.[v] Here, Brill points out the peculiar economic form taken by Carbon Credits, which function all at once as commodities, singular items, and autonomous gifts. A crucial aspect of carbon credits is that, contrary to how the characteristic of the commodity form is its neutrality in regards to origin of the product, carbon credits rely upon a certain morality or ethical imperative to grant them value in the first place. It’s almost a rhetorical form of labor that the credits must have access to for their value to be valorized.
To try and understand this process, the move from emergent to institutional climate narrative and the role in this move played by clifi as a self-consciously fictional genre, I want to stand clifi on its head a bit and disambiguate the metadiscourse of climate narrative writ large. As we’ve seen from Brill’s work on Carbon Credits, and as we see in many facets of the carbon capture economy that perpetuates a fiction – that market interventions can attenuate the worst excesses of fossil capitalism – the stories around these technologies, products, etc. are in some sense real fictions; carbon credits pretend to value in ways that are very similar to Marx’s own ideas of “fictitious capital,” that is, debt, in volume III of Capital.[vi]
These more technical interpretations of Marx’s key texts coincide with some interesting philosophy that links materialism with the affective and political, and remember that according to Deleuze and Guattari, the arts create percepts and affects.[vii] Jason Read is one philosopher who uses pop culture to demonstrate the link between Marx and Spinoza to understand counterintuitive political phenomena. Read’s work fleshes out a theory of ideology that accounts for the often-self-destructive actions by individuals and institutions. One of Read’s favorite interlocutors, Yves Citton, makes a number of compelling contributions here in terms of the interface of the personal and political vis a vis desire, the importance of the attention economy to late capitalism, and the constitution of ideology through an assemblage of narratives that are at least heterogenous, and often contradictory in his work Mythocratie.[viii] This process of narrative bricolage is a general notion that guides more specific processes outlined above, particularly the case study of Japanese narratives around CCS technology, which harnesses the passions involved in techno optimism and nationalism in such a way as to subvert the obvious contradiction between the CCS’s reality and the institutional narrative of its potential to unfetter a mode of production that is fueled by oil and coal.
To conclude, Jeff Vandermeer is correct when he claims that clifi cannot and will not save us. Far from a gesture of false humility in acknowledgement of his own centrality in the genre, Vandermeer is pointing to the constructed nature of the subgenre and its subtle and nuanced connections to our climate reality. As Citton points out, there is a metalepsis inherent to narrative that demands we situate ourselves inside and outside the narrative at once, and this metalepsis is all the more pronounced within the framework of self-conscious genre fiction and non-fictional narratives that nevertheless fail to correspond to reality. Emergent narratives about climate, employment, global markets, etc. assail us via social media, curated by predatory algorithms. This becomes the grist for the mill of cultural production, providing the foundations for – and limits to – the imaginary of clifi authors. And while hope itself can never solve a problem of this magnitude, over time narratives of many types are assimilated to ideological persuasions and even adopted by institutions, which can then become essential to legislation, market innovations, and similar interventions that have a chance at saving our skins.[ix]
[i] “Climate Fiction Won’t Save Us,” Esquire, April 19, 2023, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a43541988/climate-fiction-wont-save-us/.
[ii] Hajdu, 305.
[iii] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2007); Gabriel Burrow, “The Low Bar: Crisis and Utopia in M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (2022),” n.d.
[iv] Shinichiro Asayama and Atsushi Ishii, “Selling Stories of Techno-Optimism? The Role of Narratives on Discursive Construction of Carbon Capture and Storage in the Japanese Media,” Energy Research & Social Science 31 (September 2017): 50–59, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.06.010.
[v] Saskia Brill, “A Story of Its Own: Creating Singular Gift-Commodities for Voluntary Carbon Markets,” Journal of Cultural Economy 14, no. 3 (May 4, 2021): 332–43, https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2020.1864448.
[vi] Karl Marx, Ben Fowkes, and David Fernbach, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, V. 1: Penguin Classics (London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981).
[vii] Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?, European Perspectives (New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Pr, 1994).
[viii] Yves Citton, Mythocratie: storytelling et imaginaire de gauche (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2010).
[ix] “The Handmaid’s Tale,” SVOD, The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 2025 2017); M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 (Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2022); Annihilation, SVOD, Science Fiction (Netflix, 2018); Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation, First Edition, Southern Reach Trilogy 1 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).
When people think of landscape architecture, small-scale recreational spaces like urban parks, gardens, and golf courses may come to mind. MacArthur “Genius Award” winner Kate Orff has a grander and more ecologically ambitious vision.
Orff, director of Columbia University’s Urban Design Program, believes that architects should do more than just create beautiful spaces: They also need to work with nature to create resilient living environments that both help to knit human communities together and protect them against the ravages of climate change.
SCAPE, the New York City-based design firm that Orff founded in 2007, is currently working in Louisiana on a project that will counter sea level rise and land loss in the Mississippi River Delta. SCAPE has also partnered with the Atlanta Regional Commission to create a 125-mile-long trail and greenway along the Chattahoochee River, which aims to bring racially diverse communities along its banks together, based on their shared love of the river.
In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Orff said that it is not enough simply to restore natural systems to their former condition. “There is no ‘pure nature’ that’s outside of us, untouched up there in the foothills somewhere,” she said. “We’ve ‘made’ the world what it is already, so now we need to take a very, very strong hand in the remaking. … A big part of climate adaptation may simply be unbuilding what we’ve already built.”
Yale Environment 360: What is the role of landscape architecture in an era of climate change?
Kate Orff: Since I went to school in 1997, the world has radically changed, and so have our views on what is necessary and important. So what I’ve done is taken the tools that I’ve learned as a licensed professional landscape architect — horticulture, grading and drainage, shaping the ground and the earth. But I’ve used them with a very different purpose.
One goal of mine is to think of landscape architecture not as a top-down thing where I impose my vision, but much more as a community-driven way to channel many voices. The second goal is to focus on the impact of climate change and to shift the whole profession towards large-scale climate adaption projects.
e360: You set up SCAPE to engage in these kinds of ecological projects.
Orff: That’s right. SCAPE is a private design practice, so we have conventional projects like waterfront parks and gardens, but we also do really large-scale resilience and adaptation planning.
One example is that we worked with Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority on a massive plan that essentially looks at the state and helps guide investment and projects for the coastal region.
Louisiana has lost about 2,000 square miles of land to anthropogenic factors like sea level rise. We’ve been helping to develop a master plan for coastal restoration and risk reduction that combines marsh creation with bottomland reforestation, sediment diversions, and related landscape restoration and job-creation strategies.
“What we’re trying to do is integrate many local projects into a larger scale systemic approach, into a larger scale resilience plan.” e360: So basically you are looking at this large region and proposing what to do in various parts of it?
Orff: Yes, so that it all comes together. Often we are only responding in a piecemeal way. We have system collapse, but we address it with single limited projects here and there. What we are trying to do is integrate many local projects into a larger-scale systemic approach, into a larger-scale resilience plan.
e360: Tell us about the Living Breakwaters project. What stage are you at, and what are your goals there?
Orff: After Superstorm Sandy hit in October 2012, New York City’s Department of Housing and Urban Development started this project called Rebuild by Design. We worked with them to develop the Living Breakwaters project in Staten Island. It’s essentially a stone-core breakwater that is seeded with oysters, a structure that takes that harmful wave action out of the equation and helps rebuild the beach. It’s also bringing a critical intertidal marine ecosystem back into the urban landscape where it has been decimated. Next year oyster cultivation is going to start up.
e360: Oysters were once an important species in New York Harbor.
Orff: Right, they were a keystone species until they collapsed in around 1900. We went from a harbor that was maybe 20 percent oyster reefs to zero. That was a profound physical change. We essentially went from slower, cleaner water to faster, dirtier water, because oysters filter the water, especially of excess nitrogen. It led to a collapse in much of our marine life.
e360: A project like this entails a new way of thinking about landscape architecture, doesn’t it? You are not just designing the physical landscape. You are taking an active hand in designing the biological environment as well.
Orff: Now, with the sixth extinction, we need to think radically differently about what infrastructure means. We need to include life and see that living landscapes are a form of infrastructure in the sense that forests, for example, clean our water and our air. Oyster reefs clean the water and buffer the shore, and mangrove forests help keep our coastal shorelines intact. An exciting change is that we are reframing ecosystems as infrastructure, and we are testing and modeling their efficacy.
e360: This is sometimes referred to as green infrastructure, isn’t it?
Orff: Yes, it is essentially the design and deployment of living systems — reforesting, restoring coral, building bio-swales to capture and hold water. It’s basically thinking about the physical landscape and the ecological systems that sustain us and weaving them back into cities, weaving them back into the fabric of our communities in order to help us adapt in the long term, not just to respond to emergencies.
e360: I’m intrigued that, in talking about such matters, you don’t generally speak about “restoring nature.” You speak instead of something you call “regenerative design.” What’s the difference?
Orff: Restoring nature is trying to bring back nature for nature’s sake. As much as I, too, am guilty of that desire at times, this is simply not possible because our water quality has changed, and our air and water temperatures have changed. What I’m trying to do is rebuild natural systems in a strategic way that reduces climate risk for communities.
e360: You’ve been quoted as saying: “There’s no more natural nature. Now it’s a matter of design.” What did you mean by that?
Orff: We humans are profoundly impacting the planet. There is no “pure nature” that’s outside of us, untouched up there in the foothills somewhere. We’ve “made” the world what it is already, so now we need to take a very, very strong hand in the remaking. It is a matter of design in the sense that it requires work, intention, design, funding, political skills. It’s not a naive or nostalgic attempt to restore the past. Instead, it’s layering up natural systems to reduce risk, building this hybrid future of stewarded nature.
e360: In Staten Island you are building a breakwater offshore, but in other places you have advocated tearing down some built structures to allow water a place to go during floods.
Orff: We have to soften our shorelines, we need to remove roadways from critical migration paths. Otherwise, flash flooding will get worse, and our biodiversity will continue to plummet. So a big part of climate adaptation may simply be unbuilding what we’ve already built. Rather than thinking of design as something merely additive or “beautifying,” we need to think about undoing our environmental mistakes, like damming rivers, bulkheading our shorelines, and concretizing streams. We need to start making room for rivers and floods.
e360: We’ve tried to control nature with big infrastructure projects. But that can backfire, can’t it?
Orff: For decades, infrastructure has been constructed as “single-purpose,” often designed by engineers to isolate one element of a system and to solve one problem. For example, on Staten Island, during Superstorm Sandy, a levee designed to keep water out was overtopped, resulting in a “bathtub effect” that trapped water inside a neighborhood rather than keeping it out and resulted in several deaths. We try to lock natural systems in place. But, of course, that is not the way that natural systems respond, and it is wholly insufficient for a climate-changed environment where we’re experiencing more intense rain in many regions, where we are facing more extreme heat, where sea levels are rising. The old rules, frankly, no longer apply.
e360: One region that you’ve thought a lot about is the Mississippi River. You’ve proposed a Mississippi River National Park. How would that work?
Orff: We need to think more comprehensively about the American landscape. We used to do that — even if it was Route 66, which went across the country, or when we set up the National Park System. There was a time when we were thinking at a bigger scale. Now we are so polarized, so fragmented, that we’re only able to think about the next thing that is immediately possible in a small area.
So the Mississippi River National Park was an idea that proposed a larger vision, connecting the river back to its floodplain and connecting its stakeholders — from the Iowa pig farmer to the Louisiana shrimper — and, in my mind, ultimately reducing the risk that some of these communities would be facing.
e360: The national park framework would be a way of bringing the river back to a healthy state?
Orff: The national park framework, as flawed as that might be, is a way to pull together these lands for recreation and climate adaption purposes and to bring the river back as a living system. Because right now it is not. The river is fragmented and exists in the lower Mississippi as a pollution drain, and the upper river all runs behind constructed levees so when we do have a flood it is just massive.
e360: On a somewhat less ambitious scale, you have a project in the Atlanta metropolitan area called the Chattahoochee RiverLands, a 125-mile-long bikeway and greenway that passes through both white and Black communities. You’ve said that such projects can help bring polarized communities together.
Orff: For this project, we cut through red tape, charting a path of access through a mosaic of public and private lands. It’s a radical effort to stitch together a historically fragmented public realm that showcases the river’s ecology and history. Beyond its physical footprint, the goal of the RiverLands is to raise public awareness, improve connections and access, address a long legacy of environmental racism, expand mobility for underserved communities, and build on a strong regional legacy of water resource conservation and protection.
It is also about bringing people together from communities that don’t always have much interaction — and that is already working. Rivers have such power to bring people together, to link up disjointed places, and bring life back into cities.
Description of the book:
"More than sixty speculative art and design projects explore how art, food, and creative thinking can prepare us for future catastrophes.
In the age of the Anthropocene—a era characterized by human-caused climate disaster—catastrophes and dystopias loom. The Anthropocene Cookbook takes our planetary state of emergency as an opportunity to seize the moment to imagine constructive change and new ideas. How can we survive in an age of constant environmental crises? How can we thrive? The Anthropocene Cookbook answers these questions by presenting a series of investigative art and design projects that explore how art, food, and creative thinking can prepare us for future catastrophes. This cookbook of ideas rethinks our eating habits and traditions, challenges our food taboos, and proposes new recipes for humanity's survival.
These more than sixty projects propose new ways to think and make food, offering tools for creative action rather than traditional recipes. They imagine modifying the human body to digest cellulose, turning plastic into food, tasting smog, extracting spices and medicines from sewage, and growing meat in the lab. They investigate provocative possibilities: What if we made cheese using human bacteria, enabled human photosynthesis through symbiosis with algae, and brought back extinct species in order to eat them? The projects are diverse in their creative approaches and their agendas—multilayered, multifaceted, hybrid, and cross-pollinated. The Anthropocene Cookbook offers a survival guide for a future gone rogue, a road map to our edible futures."
The complete book can be downloaded at Z-Library: https://b-ok.xyz/book/23307959/efb1a7
Post-Anthropocene
The Anthropocene is detrimental not only to the environment - resulting in land, water and air degradation, epitomized by the current climate crisis - but is also causing more and more harm to human populations. This subreddit is a place to share and develop methodologies to get to an epoch post-Anthropocene.
This community is a place to share and develop methodologies for working with the environment, as well as developing a non-Anthropocentric point of view, for the purpose of reaching an epoch post-Anthropocene.
Rules
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This is an English-language community. Comments should be in English. Posts can link to non-English news sources when providing a full-text translation in the post description. Automated translations are fine, as long as they don’t overly distort the content.
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No links to misinformation, commercial advertising, or A.I. Generated content.
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When you post outdated/historic articles, add the year of publication to the post title. Infographics must include a source and a year of creation; if possible, also provide a link to the source.
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Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. Don’t post direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments. Don’t troll nor incite hatred.
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No bigotry, sexism, racism, antisemitism, islamophobia, dehumanization of minorities, et cetera. Strive to post insightful comments. Add “/s” when you’re being sarcastic (and don’t use it to break rule no. 4).
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If you link to paywalled information, please provide also a link to a freely available archived version. Alternatively, try to find a different source.
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Don’t evade bans. If we notice ban evasion, that will result in a permanent ban for all the accounts we can associate with you.
(This list may get expanded as necessary.)___