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.
This session is part of the Learning Planet Festival, hosted by the Learning Planet Institute and UNESCO between January 21 and 28, 2026.
Speakers
Joni Adamson, President’s Professor of Environmental Humanities, Arizona State University; co-editor, Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos
Libia Brenda, writer, translator, and editor of Odo Ediciones; author, De qué silencio vienes
Azucena Castro, assistant professor, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Rice University; author, Poetic Postnatures: Ecological Thinking and Politics of Strangeness in Contemporary Latin American Poetry
Chinelo Onwualu, writer and editor; cohost, Griots and Galaxies podcast; editor, Ex Marginalia: Essays from the Edges of Speculative Fiction
Jennifer Richter, assistant professor, School for the Future of Innovation in Society and School of Social Transformation, Arizona State University; co-editor, Environmental Realism: Challenging Solutions
Ed Finn, founding director, Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University; co-editor, Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures