In this chapter we envision the possible futures of the African buffalo populations in Africa by reflecting on the regional and international factors and their relationships that could positively or negatively impact the healthiness of the buffalo species in the next 30 years. Using the expertise of the authors of this book, we drafted and validated a list of factors of change that could impact the futures of African buffalo populations on the continent and use a set of prospective methods, i.e. structural analysis, critical uncertainty matrix and morphological analysis to develop seven synopses which provided caricatural African contexts within which the consequences for African buffalo populations could be imagined. In 2050, the futures of the African buffalo will vary according to each country specific social, technical, economic, environmental, political and value contexts. In a context of climate change that will impact increasingly the environmental contexts in Africa, good futures for buffalo were often associated with political stability and good governance. The proportion of African living in cities will also be important. The ratio of urban versus rural African will not only determine the intensity of the agricultural pressure on land but also the African worldviews towards nature and its conservation. The influence of non-African states will also be determinant, especially in extractive industries and their request for land. A pivotal factor is the conservation models that will prevail in 2050: to what extent they are still influenced and constrained by part of the Western opinion; to what extent they are funded by them; and to what extent African worldviews push for the design of new conservation models based on different relationship between people and nature. Probably, landscapes associating land-sparing (e.g. national parks) and land-sharing management options, based on the sustainable use of natural resources will provide the best futures for buffalo to thrive on the continent.

This chapter offers a temporal view on mobility: the ways in which migrants negotiate their longer-term futures in Malta’s state and legal system. Showing how onward movement is constrained by legal status and a bureaucratic landscape, it front stages the importance of the journey as an analytic for theorizing mobility.

Since the late 1990s, anthropologists have increasingly turned their attention to ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’, a field of study long dominated by moral philosophers, social psychologists, and welfare economists. This chapter reviews anthropological approaches to happiness and well-being, and their engagement with ideas from virtue ethics, value theory, and capabilities approaches to development. Across a range of ethnographic cases in which the concepts have been applied as well as from which analogous concepts have been drawn, we highlight the analytical tension between (a) a search for objective measures that can be used to guide efforts aimed at increasing well-being and reducing global inequities and (b) the exploration of cultural worlds in which different peoples conceive of and pursue ‘the good life’ in varied and sometimes incommensurate ways. This multidisciplinary analytical field has been productive for anthropological theory, but scepticism remains around the implications of its evaluative impulses and ambitions.

Scenarios are among the most visible and widely used products of the IPCC. Many kinds of scenarios are used in climate research, but emissions scenarios and the socio-economic assumptions that underpin them have a distinct status because the IPCC orchestrated their development. They have evolved from assessment cycle to assessment cycle and serve as ‘boundary objects’ across Working Groups and as instruments of policy relevance. The field of Integrated Assessment Modelling has emerged to produce these scenarios, thereby taking centre stage within the IPCC assessment process. Because these scenarios harmonise assumptions about the future across disciplines, they are essential tools for the IPCC’s production of a shared assessment of climate research and for ensuring the policy relevance of this assessment. Yet, the reliance on a relatively small set of complex models to generate scenarios spurs concerns about transparency, black-boxed assumptions, and the power of IAMs to define the ‘possibility space’.

In this chapter Sharae Deckard reminds us that far from being a “green” country, Ireland’s carbon emissions are currently among the highest per capita in the EU and continue to rise, so that the Irish state falls far short of the reductions required by the Paris Agreement.” The chapter traces the history of Ireland’s energy regimes that range from turf, coal, oil, and more recently, renewables. In a comprehensive survey of the energy regimes and their representation in Irish literature Deckard argues that literary and cultural representations play a crucially subversive role in the contemporary neoliberal environment by offering “alternative conceptions of value that repudiate capitalism’s devaluing of human and extra-human life.”

This chapter explores how authorship plays out in literary texts and in the wider world. The starting premise is that canonical authors, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, function as focal points for the flow of both cultural and monetary value. The agency inherent within their ‘world author’ persona is accordingly distributed across a wide variety of actors. This leads to a much broader discussion of ‘world authorship’ as an extended process whereby literary writing both shapes and is shaped by the world(s) in which it exists. This process is headed up by individuals who are placed into an attitudinal relationship towards such activity, ranging from celebration through to satire an involving both human and non-human actors. I consider this first in theoretical terms, keying Goethe’s holistic understanding of how art and architecture intersect to concepts around ‘worlding’, ‘authorship’ and ‘literary imagination’, as developed by Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault and Leslie Adelson respectively. I then examine the historical context of West German publishing and how the attitudinal ‘modes of authorship’ this particular context makes apparent prefigure a contemporary turn towards a broader model of authorship that is deliberately inclusive. The recent work of the prize-winning German-language writer, Katja Petrowskaja, which builds on deep-rooted global flows of people, concepts and things and points to new ways of accessing these through language, illustrates this point.

This chapter engages with the complexities of Anthropocene politics and ecologies in Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Home to the densest concentration of wind turbines anywhere on earth, the Isthmus is a key site for climate change mitigation, but not without controversy. Working from the viewpoint of cultural anthropology, we show how local Indigenous and mestizo communities are contending with the massive transformation of their lands and livelihoods. We ask a central question for Anthropocenic times: what are the political forces that shape the possibilities for low carbon futures? Who sets the agenda for transitions and who—human and otherwise—is affected by enormous infrastructural shifts in energy systems? In this chapter, we show how various forces—political, economic and cultural—operate along with the wind itself to shape local futures in both positive and negative ways. We pay special attention to Indigenous philosophies and experiences because they help us see better possibilities at the nexus of energy, environment and human thriving.

Subtitled “A Story of Chicago,” Frank Norris’s The Pit chronicles a system of commodities exchange that made all localities, including Chicago, increasingly dissolve into globalized abstraction. Even though the novel is partly a realist account of the distinctive business practices of America’s fastest growing city, it is also a naturalist meditation on the abstracting effects of the futures market on place itself. Pioneered in Chicago, commodities futures trading usually amounted to competing bets on future prices, by which traders dealt in wheat that did not even exist. In such a market, place itself grew abstract too, given that traders no longer had to think about where grain came from, or how to ship it from one place to another. However, against the argument that The Pit punishes futures speculation by drowning it in a flood of real wheat, this chapter argues that the market corner at the novel’s heart is a desperate and finally failed attempt to re-establish traditional forms of materiality and locality from within the world of speculative finance.

This chapter explores a mise-en-scène familiar to us from postapocalyptic movies and video games: that of a future American city emptied of human life and activity. After tracing this chronotope back to early nineteenth-century European romantic fantasies of the “last man,” the essay considers how it came to be applied, with variations, to American cities between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth. Examples include works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, H. G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois as well as those by largely forgotten authors, and encompass utopian and apocalyptic fiction as well as dystopian and postapocalyptic. Critics have largely characterized such visions of urban desolation as a negative, cathartic expression of some fear, whether of ethnic others, natural disaster, or nuclear warfare. This chapter, however, recovers the productive possibilities they offered. Vacated cityscapes empowered readers to reflect critically upon modern urban life, in particular new phenomena such as skyscraper architecture, technological infrastructure, the experience of surging crowds and webs of social interdependency, the suppression of nature, the impermanence of urban space, and racial segregation.

This chapter discusses what a more thoroughly globalized environmental sociology might look like, and the need to re-think more deeply the ways in which we conceptualize environmental sociology. Five challenges are discussed: i) the need to better understand globalization itself and the emergence of new sources and forms of authority; ii) the socially uneven causes and impacts of global environmental problems and injustices; iii) the task of democratizing science by asking whose voices are missing and whose knowledge counts in the understanding of global environmental matters; iv) the need for a more cosmopolitan environmental sociology that is sensitive both to local particularities and to shared concerns at the national and transnational levels; and v) the question of how environmental sociology might contribute to debate about possible and desirable global futures. The chapter concludes by arguing that responding to these challenges and engaging productively with other disciplines requires a sociology that unsettles boundaries between the social and natural sciences and partipates on equal terms in the production of environmental knowledge.

Commodity exchanges have proliferated greatly since 2000, both in terms of places where the trade is conducted, and in terms of the products that are subject to trade. The main aim of this chapter is to describe these commodity exchanges, as well as the commodities traded there. The main instruments used, including their functioning, is presented as well as the main actors and their objectives. The chapter ends with discussing commodity exchanges impact on price formation, including the role of speculation.

New and emerging environmental issues make policy and practice difficult.A pressing need to respond when knowledge of the problem is limited is added to an already challenging conservation agenda. Horizon-scanning is an evolving approach that draws on diverse information sources to identify early indications of poorly recognised threats and opportunities. There are many ways to conduct horizon scans, ranging from automated techniques that scan online content and mine text to manual methods that systematically consult large groups of people (often experts). These different approaches aim to sort through vast volumes of information to look for signals of change, for example the rise in microplastics or the use of mobile phones to gather data in remote forests. Identifying these new threats and opportunities is the first important step towards further researching and managing them. This chapter reviews different approaches to horizon-scanning, together with ways of encouraging uptake of scanning outputs. It concludes by introducing emerging technologies that will add value to horizon-scanning in the future.

The concluding chapter pulls together key elements of a Green vision for global politics. It summarises the basis o a Green alternative in each of the areas covered in the book: security, economy, the state, global governance, development and sustainability. Recognising diversity of views and multiple theories of change, it suggests critical areas where this vision can be taken forward around the renewal of democracy and subsidiarity, by recommoning and economic democracy, by building new alliances and pursuing just transitions. The politics of the twenty-first century are and will be the politics of sustainability. The question for all of us is: whose politics and on whose terms?