Throughout this volume, infrastructure is revealed as a site of uneven development and exploitation, wherein progress for some is achieved through violence toward others. However, this important feature of infrastructure is not consistently highlighted by the volume’s contributors.

On August 3, 2019 Patrick Crusius opened fire in a crowded WalMart, killing 22 people and injuring 24 more. The killer left behind a manifesto in which he justified his actions as a defense against the “replacement” of white Americans by Latinx people, a threat exacerbated, he explains, by climate change.

In the early summer morning of the first day of the 2017 G20 summit, thousands of red-clad protestors descended on the Port of Hamburg. For six hours, they blocked all major road and rail routes out of the port, bringing the monotonous flow of shipping containers to a standstill.

Scientists from Santiago travel thousands of miles to the dusty Atacameñan desert community of Camar to tout hydraulic recharge models that predict restoration of a freshwater aquifer by 2600. Others pontificate on the validity of using CropSyst, a model developed by wheat researchers in eastern Washington, for understanding the impacts of water use on fragile, perennial vegetation.

Gyalpo and I walk across the aftermath of an avalanche, as the debris continues to shift beneath and around us. Three years later, the compacted ice is still melting. He is trying not to think of his parents, whose home was here, whom I stayed with the night before the earthquake. I can’t imagine his position.

The South China Sea is politically contested from its surface to its bed. China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Brunei all make claims on the volume of this sea — known variously (the list is not exhaustive) as “the South Sea (南海),” “the East Sea (Biển Đông),” “the Luzon Sea/the Philippine Sea,” and “the Natuna Sea.”

Although the photographic scenes claim to tell a story of what it is like to experience homelessness during severe weather, the images that coalesced around this encampment in their very representation–ironically–rendered the subjects experiencing homelessness, absent. Like the center of a vortex, the photographs performed the operation of presenting a replete image all the while absenting its alleged content.

‍An enduring image associated with the recent “fracking” boom in North Dakota’s Bakken region is a 2016 nighttime photograph of North America taken by NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite. In the image, an enormous swath of illumination as bright as major cities covers the sparsely populated northern Great Plains.

The years-long legal battle between British musicians Robbie Williams and Jimmy Page over Williams's intention to build a swimming pool in his basement has recently come to a close, conditionally in Williams's favor. Page had reason to be concerned: since the late aughts, the super-basement craze among the more well-heeled that has flooded council planning committees and inspired a gimmicky BBC documentary has also wreaked havoc on neighbors.

The ground has volume. It is a voluminous surface. As such, it cannot be an object of sovereignty.

‍Cornel West once wrote that “it is imperative to steer a course between the Scylla of environmental determinism and the Charybdis of a blaming-the-victims perspective” (West, 1993, 2017: 57). West’s warnings of the twin dangers of racism, both of which have been flirted with by geographers, serves as a useful reminder for thinking about the vortex.

‍The rush of air and water over a territory are not the only flows that shape its terrain. And it is movement that, “instead of being subsequent to geography, is geography” (Steinberg 2013, 157). The term “eddy” can capture not just unidirectional movement and flows but also their unpredictable, counter-intuitive, spiral-like, concentric, centrifugal, and centripetal tendencies. Eddy is both natural phenomenon and a spatial metaphor for “human vulnerability and adaptability in times of unprecedented transformation.”

"Caribbean Futures in the Offshore Anthropocene: Debt, Disaster, and Duration" offers a stark and urgent analysis on the entanglement of debt and disaster, affirming both the “unnatural” consequences of “natural disasters” and how influential place histories are to recovery, mobility and future possibilities. Sheller provides readers the opportunity to speculate about Caribbean futures through the lens of climate disasters, a topic that has pressing concerns for many scholars and activists across the globe.

Mimi Sheller asks the daunting question: ‘What kinds of human, non-human, and island futures can exist here?’ It is a question that has continued to be asked from the dawn of capitalism and the earliest moments of the European presence in the Caribbean. Expressed in the anxieties of early colonial settlers who viewed a corrupted future as the only kind that could be had in this space, the people of this region have always had to fight against the coloniality of extraction and abandonment.

Mimi Sheller’s work offers a lucid synthesis of diverse literatures to reckon with the Caribbean’s centrality to – and silencing within – our understanding of Western modernity and its signal, if not terminal, crisis, climate change. Readers will find much to inspire them to tackle these questions in Sheller’s essay and her numerous other writings.