In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua offers an important intervention into the vague sense of dread, discomfort, and culpability that thinking about palm oil may evoke. Here, palm oil is situated, and its impacts on a specific group of people in a specific place are drawn out. The effect is powerful; a precise story of grief, loss, and endurance in a world fractured by colonialism and untrammelled agribusiness expansion, beautifully realised in Chao’s poetic voice.

Tubb clarifies how excavator gold mining roots itself in Black Communities’ collective territories through productive transformations on the landscape, wages to workers, land rent to Black families, revenue dividends to local community councils, and security “taxes” to illegal armed groups. Tubb’s ethnography opens the door for a deep and wide examination of racial capitalism, even if he never defines value.

Arboleda demonstrates an astounding grasp of parallel debates within Marxist theory in particular and great skill at being able to deftly weave them together into a structure that reads remarkably well given its theoretical scope.

Katrina allowed for the ultimate greenwashing campaign for oil and gas companies to frame themselves as environmental benefactors of Louisiana’s coastal restoration program, which is funded by oil and natural gas royalties. By tying coastal restoration to the state’s fossil fuel industry, Louisiana’s precarious future is predicated on extraction, increased carbon emissions, and a secondary market of petrochemical production up and down the Mississippi River’s “Cancer Alley” for inexpensive natural gas.

Design Earth's fourteen #Geostories offer us architectural imaginations for much needed new Earth Futures. They offer the chance to ponder our shared spatial consciousness, and the role it might play in both understanding and solving our current environmental crisis.