Oscillating between naturalistic observations and conceptual forays, this essay simultaneously performs and introduces the notion of “composing climate change” at the heart of this special issue. Spanning personal narrative, poetry, dialogue, theoretical meditation, thick description, photographic essay, and other modes of scholarly writing, the contributors to this issue experiment with genre, style, and form as they seek to describe, evoke, grasp, disclose, and otherwise imagine what it means and—crucially—what it feels like to be an earthling in a time of tremendous ecological change and profound planetary transformation.

A residency on the coast inspires reflections on the view. How has the shoreline “view” been compromised by private interest? What happens when the need to gaze deeply into epic nature, to get lost in the scale and beauty of the shore, is no longer accessible? How can popular forms of education push back and build environmental consciousness? If climate change is about aesthetic devastation as much as toxicity, resource depletion, and colonialism, then the shoreline offers a reflexive site through which to reconsider views of the land and to argue for democratic access.

Drawing from in situ fieldwork in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, the northernmost settlement on Earth, these notes bring out the affective, ambient, and atmospheric power of extended darkness during the polar night, when the sun does not appear above the horizon for several months at a time. Each entry is composed of 113 words to reflect the number of days without light in Longyearbyen during the winter of my visit. Through a mixture of ethnographic observations, researched academic scholarship, and some endeavors of poetic worldmaking, these notes attempt to evoke the ineffable force of global warming by performing the sort of acutely observed and felt attentiveness to planetary being that is needed for our time.

In this essay, I use performative writing as a framework to explore the problem of climate change. Specifically, the shifting and accumulative nature of clouds serves as a trope for imaginatively restaging environmental issues. In the essay, I view the environment as a symbolic and material construction that is coproduced in connection to the personal, discursive, and collective unconscious. Through narrative, poetry, and performance, I argue for the concept of environmental performativity as a metonym for exploring the interdependent relationship among the individual, environment, and climate change.

While hurricanes are weather events that may become human/ecological tragedies, they might help create stylized moments too. Hurricanes can be distinctive from each other in message and in the tools they use as their material aspects (wind speed or storm surge) interact with cities, social structures, and popular media messages. One way to explore hurricane styles is through forms of affective mapping. This exploration analyzes features of several hurricanes that made landfall in 21st-century North America in combination with considerations of affect around hurricanes. The combination of material and affective elements of hurricanes might allow rhetorical style to serve as a way of rethinking hurricanes and their connections, from the individual level to global climate change.

In this essay, I demonstrate how the ecological concept of “scaling” carries potential to animate critical logics in the Anthropocene. I argue that scaling can expose unexpected linkages across space and time that help to denaturalize particular ecological formations as entangled, rather than separate. I demonstrate the critical ecological potential of scaling by performing it rhizomatically, weaving across scales of space and time while juxtaposing theoretical concepts with my experiences of life as a resident in the urban desert landscape of Phoenix, AZ. This ecology ultimately reveals how climate change acts as a complex necropolitic of the Anthropocene.

In this essay, we survey recent prominent works of climate fiction, or cli-fi, through the lens of Indigenous futurism, arguing that several of these works pointedly absent or even appropriate Indigenous perspectives and traditions. We conclude that this genre potentially works to justify settler colonialism.