All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you."

Those words of Octavia Butler have never sounded truer that in this New Earth of the Anthropocene. For the biotic community of the planet, Butler’s prophetic truth has become impossible to ignore, especially at the frontlines of climate change, the zones of extraction and depletion which paid for the techno-utopias in the global North. As climate systems break down, we face a biosphere crisis, a hydrosphere crisis, a crisis of clean, breathable air, a crisis of the planet’s carbon cycle. Artists and writers warn of a crisis of imagination too. To this we add a crisis of education, a crisis that arises from fetishizing technical knowledge and results in fanciful sustainability dreams. We are all changed in this New Earth, and we need an updated vocabulary to inhabit the future. Oftentimes, this will mean resuscitating what has been long being known but devalued or suppressed.

Welcome to THE COMMONS, a podcast series produced in The University of Massachusetts Amherst, which was founded and built on the unceded homelands of the Pocumtuc Nation on the land of the Norrwutuck community. In each episode, we bring together scholars, artists, writers, and thinkers to explore the imaginative depths, the historical knowledges, and the decolonial intelligences urgently needed to build futures.