The escalating threat of climate change poses ever-more-urgent challenges around justice, mutual care, and humans’ duties in environmental stewardship. Meanwhile, our most prevalent stories about climate futures continue to be catastrophic and cautionary: a zero-sum mentality often prevails in international policy venues, making concerted, collaborative action feel nearly impossible, and our popular imaginary is flooded with clamorous visions of violence and privation. But alternative stories can help to illuminate hopeful pathways forward and more effectively catalyze action, envisioning climate futures shaped by care and cooperation, just and equitable relations, and an emphasis on regeneration over extraction.
Join the Storying Just Futures project and the Center for Science and the Imagination, both based at Arizona State University, for this conversation with scholars and authors working at the intersection of story, justice, and science. Several of our panelists recently contributed to the new book Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures (MIT Press, 2025), a collection of short fiction, essays, and visual art that explores vibrant, decarbonized futures through contributions representing 17 different countries around the world.
