INTRODUCTION

EcoFutures is a project on speculative fiction, nonfiction, and other creative work on climate justice. In each issue, our contributors will imagine actionable, inspiring, bottom-up solutions and adaptations in the face of the climate chaos, environmental degradation, and escalating inequality. We look to voices from the margins of the current global order, seeking alternatives to the top-down interventions that dominate mainstream climate discourse. We focus on India—a geographically and culturally diverse nation which is severely climate-stressed, one of the world’s most densely populated regions, and riven by social and economic inequality.

Each issue will feature an original creative work and/or interview with a featured writer, and a response essay by a scholar or activist, along with other materials. 

In this first issue, we feature a story from Easterine Kire, an acclaimed writer from the Indigenous Naga community in India, exploring the tension points between economies of extraction, imperatives for survival, the incursion of global forces into rural areas, stewardship of natural systems, and connectedness with the land and its ecologies. The story is paired with a response essay by Indigenous jurist and legal scholar Rebecca Tsosie, creating a vibrant conversation between two Indigenous voices from very different physical and cultural geographies. We also present a brief review by EcoFutures co-lead Vandana Singh of Kire’s novel When the River Sleeps, an interview with Kire, and a new Hindi translation of environmental justice scholar Kyle Whyte’s essay “Time as Kinship,” which explores the nature of time as framed by climate science, and how it contrasts with an alternative Indigenous conception of time built on the foundation of kinship. 

EcoFutures is supported by CoFutures at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo and the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University.