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.

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.”

‍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. My argument here follows three steps. First, I shall bring out the original sense of volume as the rolling up or turning over of material, thanks to which its lower and upper regions are continually inverted. Second, I shall demonstrate that this kind of rolled-over surface is incompatible with the logic of the state, which requires that the ground be levelled. Third, I shall show how the exercise of volumetric sovereignty by the state therefore means relinquishing the ground for spaces above and below, respectively aerial and subterranean, contained within an abstract grid of three dimensions.

‍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.

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. Her Society & Space essay, ‘Caribbean Futures,’ deftly constructs a mobilities grammar to reframe Caribbean disaster narratives on terms that demand engagement with the region’s colonial legacies and enduring racial formations, as well as alternatives drawing upon Caribbean emancipatory thought and practice.

I want to thank Sharlene Mollett, Beverley Mullings, and Marion Werner for their incredibly generous, generative responses to my paper on “Caribbean Futures,” as well as their important critical interventions. Here I want to respond to what I consider the key points made in each of their responses, which I believe are crucial questions not only for Caribbean geography, but also for all geographers to consider.

To note the ubiquity of the term resilience in scholarship has become somewhat of a cliche. The pervasiveness of resilience is apparent as much in geography as it is in civil engineering, ecology, economics, psychology and, as Grove’s Resilience demonstrates well, design studies.