Full Description
Concerns about the exploitation of limited resources, optimum development trajectories, and climate change draw attention to the temporal horizons of our environment - Environmental Futures is a curated collection of essays that explores different ways of knowing the future and how these futures shape contemporary social worlds.
Includes a range of detailed case studies, from ice melting in Antarctica to coal mining in Bangladesh, flooding in Colombia to climate modelling in Egypt
Approaches prognosis as a cultural, political, and material process
Reveals the ways in which authority and expertise may be reinforced, circumscribed, or contested in the process of making a prediction and its aftermath
Offers novel insights on how and why futures come to be significant in the present
Contents
Prognosis: visions of environmental futures (Andrew S. Mathews and Jessica Barnes)
Sensing the ice: field science, models, and expert intimacy with knowledge (Jessica O'Reilly)
Uncertainty in the signal: modelling Egypt's water futures (Jessica Barnes)
Subsoil abundance and surface absence: a junior mining company and its performance of prognosis in Northwestern Ecuador (David Kneas)
Mines and signs: resource and political futures in Bangladesh (Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury)
Chronicle of a disaster foretold: scientific risk assessment, public participation, and the politics of imperilment in Bristol Bay, Alaska (Karen Hébert)
A doubtful hope: resource affect in a future oil economy (Gisa Weszkalnys)
Liquid Oman: oil, water, and causality in Southern Arabia (Mandana Limbert)
Prognosis past: the temporal politics of disaster in Colombia (Austin Zeiderman)
Claiming futures (Elizabeth Ferry)
Index
