Just like infrastructure, the human work of caring for other humans is also generally taken for granted, underappreciated, and undervalued. It doesn’t scale, it doesn’t produce a direct return on investment, and it can’t be put off or ignored. Nor can it be easily replaced. Futures researcher Jamais Cascio has described a “pink collar future”9—whil

The future is not being imposed on us. We can decide what future we want to build. None of us want to abandon our neighbors, to bequeath a decaying country to our children, or to see people imprisoned or killed at our borders. Rather than refusing to face the reality of our resource usage and of climate change, or working to mitigate it just for ou

This idea of being in an ongoing relationship with others simply by virtue of having bodies that exist in the world and which share common needs is what I think of as “infrastructural citizenship.” It’s a citizenship that encompasses the people who are in a particular place in the world or connected by networks today, as well as those yet to come.

Whether we’re on the grid or off it, we’re all reliant on those around us. In part this is because virtually everything we use, from modern medical care to copper wiring, was made by or requires the expertise of many, many people, the result in part of the vastly increased technological complexity of the last century. None of us have the wide-rangi

There’s a theory that the reason why we haven’t yet observed any signs of extraterrestrial life is because civilizations are faced with an existential choice: either learn to live sustainably, in harmony with their environment, or die. Being “loud”—sending lots of energy or matter wastefully out into space—is a signature of a linear economy. Sustai

But instead of building out these facilities as monuments like the Hoover Dam, we have the opportunity to think of them as ecosystems, like forests.

A hundred or so miles north of that tree is King Clone, a ring of self-cloning creosote bushes estimated to be about twelve thousand years old. On my drive south from Salt Lake City, I passed the town of Richfield, home of “Pando,” a grove of nearly fifty thousand quaking aspens, in which the trees are genetically identical to each other and share

That doesn’t mean that we have to solve huge, overarching issues with huge, overarching solutions. In fact, we need to resist these sorts of solutions, because our landscapes and our technologies are in transition, so we absolutely want to be able to explore, experiment with, and even roll back systems as needed, and to do this in different ways in

By providing them with some energy, in the form of heat, the atoms gain a tiny bit of freedom to move around. The metal remains solid and from the outside it looks the same But inside, the atoms start to shift to relieve the stress that they’re under, just slightly. What happens next is astonishing. All through the metal, the atoms spontaneously nu