Low-carbon energy production is one of the main pillars of the European Union’s energy transition: especially green hydrogen is often represented as the last frontier of low-carbon energy and a silver bullet to slow down the climate crisis. A number of European countries are particularly active in this area. When looked at more closely, though, this vision might be illusory. Like in the case of other low-carbon energy sources, hydrogen production could perpetuate dynamics of enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, and entrenchment often emphasized in the political ecology and energy justice literature. In this article, I focus on a project implemented in a territory of Overseas France, namely French Guiana, where, in the late 2010s, French companies conceived plans for a large solar-hydrogen power plant. The Electric Plant of Western Guiana promised to save CO 2 emissions while ending recurrent outages for 70,000 Guianese. In response, the Indigenous Kali’na communities living in the territories affected by the plant’s project staged a long-term opposition to it, criticizing the imposed notion of hasty and lucrative development based on gigantic infrastructures, seen as a form of “eco-colonialism,” and bringing together a varied network of allies. However, the protest could not ultimately stop the project. Based on literature and document analysis, and on fieldwork conducted in French Guiana in September-October 2023, I have examined this socioenvironmental conflict through the prism of decolonial energy justice and political ecology. From the analysis, it emerges that the conflict’s outcome was the result of (a) the colonial vision of Guianese land as a mere economic resource, propounded by the project’s advocates; (b) the French State’s lack of recognition of an Indigenous specificity; and (c) internal fractures across Indigenous communities.

This article meditates on comparison beyond being a method, an academic technique, or a discursive strategy, and instead as a phenomenon entangled with the apocalyptic. As its critical point of departure, the article considers the concept of “demonio de las comparaciones” described by the Filipino polymath and patriot José Rizal in his novel Noli me tángere (1887), through its particular interpretation by Benedict Anderson. The latter scholar, having soon realized his own mistranslation of Rizal’s concept by transfiguring the most material to be merely spectral, eventually proposed Rizal’s demon to be more akin to pests instead. While Anderson simply explained his suggestion through describing comparison as similarly “buzz[ing] and buzz[ing], and refus[ing] to go away or to be quiet,” this article further explores the implications of pests in thinking through comparison especially in light of the present challenge of the nonhuman, or the urgent call for reconsideration of human agency among a larger network of other forms of agency. To do so, the article then reads a chapter from the contemporary Filipino novel Ang Banal na Aklat ng mga Kumag ( The Holy Book of Vermin , 2013) by Allan Derain, which narrates how comparisons unfold among rival swarms of flies in light of looming threat. Ultimately, the article intuits comparison as an inevitable phenomenon that especially emerges from, as much as it responds to, an end of the world.

This article analyses three speculative fiction novels from the last decades of the 20th century: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, along with Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) by Octavia E. Butler, from a sociological perspective. Through a theoretical analysis, we argue that these novels offer key ways to word a world and provide insight into broader cultural transformations, particularly shifts in the semantics of time and space in relation to modern imaginaries of the future. These texts illustrate a fundamental shift away from the Neuzeit paradigm (Koselleck, 2004), in which belief in progress structured social and political projects. As this belief eroded throughout the 20th century, the notion of a clearly envisioned future became unstable. However, rather than endorsing a paralyzing, catastrophic vision of the future, these works, often regarded as “critical dystopias” explore emerging semantics of time and space within the context of socio-environmental crises. By engaging with themes of ecological degradation and survival, social ties, inequalities, violence and reciprocity, these novels interrogate the intersection between speculative fiction and contemporary anxieties surrounding planetary futures.

Our contribution to this special issue takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary studies with political ecology to discuss the convergence of meteorological emergencies (storms) and political emergencies (mutinies) in two novels: Martin Delany’s Blake (1859–1862) and Lindsey Collen’s Mutiny (2001). In both novels, oceanic storms provide an opportunity for rebellion—a shipboard uprising of enslaved Africans during an Atlantic hurricane in the former, and a mutiny in a women’s prison timed to coincide with an Indian Ocean cyclone in the latter—and these rebellions in turn precipitate the emergence of new forms of political-ecological relation. Both novels reflect the legacies of slavery in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, while also articulating emergent solidarities and relations: between different groups of oppressed peoples and between these peoples and their ecological surroundings. Our central argument is twofold: first, that these “narratives of offshore dissent” use the aesthetic and rhetorical tools of literary fiction to illuminate the key insights of political ecology in terms of the emergent potential of human-nonhuman collectives; and, second, that literary texts can in turn help us to identify and articulate alternative models for human and nonhuman relation. We aim to show that literary studies and political ecology are fields that intersect in compelling ways in terms of thinking through ecological emergency and how humans relate to each other and to the world around us. Ultimately, in view of the centrality of the ocean in both novels, we read these narratives of offshore dissent from a “thalasscentric” or ocean-centered perspective in contraposition to the terracentric vision that predominates in colonialist and nationalist thinking and that has proved so destructive to human and nonhuman beings alike.

This article analyzes how the ecological crisis is affecting the way cities organize their models for economic development and social cohesion through the observation of three Spanish cities. Until the 2007 financial crisis, cities were developing strategies for economic growth and social cohesion in the framework of growing competitiveness. Nevertheless, the financial crisis and the rising awareness of the ecological crisis brought these models to discussion, opening up debates on the ecological crisis and the role of cities. The article explores how urban governance in Barcelona, Seville, and Bilbao has responded to the ecological emergency between 2015 and 2025. It examines the integration of sustainability into strategic urban planning, the impact of post-COVID recovery agendas, and the role of environmental citizenship and social movements in shaping ecological transitions. The findings reveal that these post-pandemic recovery and resilience plans have reconfigured typical city strategies, strengthening ecological modernization through green capitalism, while overshadowing discussions on the structural changes necessary to address the ecological crisis, and marginalizing the role of environmental citizenship to local stewardship. In conclusion, despite experiments with democratic urban governance at the local level, postgrowth approaches to economic development policies remain scarce in strategic planning; this gap must be addressed as a key focus for future research in urban governance, environmental sociology, and political innovation.

The emergence of the supply chain as a site of critical inquiry follows the tendency in humanities and social sciences to position key social and environmental conflicts in the logistical infrastructures where raw materials, commodities, and bulk energy supplies circulate at startling magnitudes. This article positions supply chains as important sources of differentiation internal to the logistical field, and considers the standardized moments of supply chains as the site, method, and object of infrastructural study. To do so we offer a review of the recent scholarly literature on the critical, aesthetic, and environmental affordance of tending to scenes of logistical circulation and their significance for what we are terming “supply chain criticism.” In configuring geometries of supply chain capital as primary sites of both economic and ecological causality, we argue that reading the logics of this causality is at minimum necessary for any hermeneutic invested in mitigating, repurposing, or abolishing its flows. Thinking from the specifically aquatic spaces that connect most supply chains to one another, we open by offering a set of methodological terms for humanities scholars to consider in order to read the “seam,” the “interval,” and the “hold” of maritime capital. We then trace these sites in relation to our ongoing experience of logistics fieldwork around the ports of the North Sea. This particular economic and environmental milieu has required us to adopt a situated ethic of theorization, one that draws us into affective proximity the material frictions and flux of otherwise abstract flows. Adopting a rhythmic reading practice that runs counter to clean aesthetics of supply chains, we consider how the calibration of space, time, and volume is central to how supply chains are managed, made, and remade across distinct tempos and terrains, concluding that if logistical power is reproduced through the strategic inflection of friction and difference, then these tensions can be productively harnessed in the creation of different social practices and forms of life.

Most insights about the ecological emergency come from the earth and climate sciences as well as from the life sciences, and as such they have upset established certainties in the social sciences and humanities. At the very least, they have forced the social sciences and humanities to refocus their attention on the ways in which human societies are dependent on the condition of planet Earth and of other life forms on it. In response, it is often argued that the social sciences and humanities have to overcome their anthropocentrism and/or commitment to human exceptionalism. This article provides a selective review of this ongoing debate, certainly with a personal taint, by distinguishing an epistemological, an ontological, and a world-historical and moral-philosophical question. In the first step, the article asks how the increased knowledge of the planetary condition impacts on the condition and the results of human knowledge-seeking. The second step explores the relation between the human and the non-human, which was opened up to questioning by, in particular, some strands of research in the sociology of the sciences and technology and in anthropology. Third, the implication of the first two steps for the analysis of world history is assessed, asking about the role of human beings in creating social phenomena of large scale and long duration, such as colonialism and capitalism, and their moral responsibility for the impact of these phenomena on the planet and on human and non-human life. In conclusion, it is argued that ontological anthropocentrism can be overcome, but that some degree of human exceptionalism is unavoidable in epistemological terms and necessary in moral-philosophical terms.

This article contends that the ocean—so often romanticized as boundless, fluid, and open—is in fact saturated: chemically, logistically, and affectively. Drawing from recent work in environmental humanities, blue humanities, and extinction studies, it reframes saturation not merely as a scientific metric but as a political and ecological condition. The sea emerges here as a site where residues of capital accumulate and circulate: a sensorium of extraction, corrosion, and multiagent pressure. The analysis unfolds in three movements. First, it revisits maps of ocean acidification—specifically aragonite saturation states—to interrogate their visual logics, affective registers, and epistemic assumptions. In dialogue with Helmreich’s chromatic critique and Alaimo’s materialist poetics, it asks what these representations disclose and occlude about marine dissolution. Second, it examines maritime traffic as a surface of capitalist saturation, where logistical networks redraw the ocean as a grid of extraction and relentless circulation. Here, the sea becomes infrastructural: crisscrossed by tankers, flagged by financial abstraction. Third, it traces the spectral presence of ghost nets—plastic apparitions that persist beyond utility—whose entanglements dramatize the slow violence of ecological breakdown as media. Rather than presenting saturation as a static endpoint, the article proposes it as a method of reading: a way to sense capitalism’s corrosive density across ecological, aesthetic, and cartographic forms. In place of redemption or narrative closure, it invites attention to viscosity, opacity, and the uneasy durations of the ecological emergency. The ocean, in this frame, is not emptied but overfull—haunted by accumulation, shaped by refusal, and vital as a critical medium for rethinking ecology in the era of loss and extinction due to capitalist praxes.

The ecological emergency poses a major challenge to agri-food systems, increasing attention to sustainable transitions. While environmental impacts have gathered attention, social aspects have often remained overlooked in sustainability assessments. This article examines the social dynamics shaping agri-food systems through qualitative analysis of stakeholder narratives, including farmers, value-chain actors, and agrarian advisors. Key elements found include values, practices, preferences, and relationship networks that influence social sustainability. Findings highlight the significance of product commercialization (i.e. farm viability and value-chain structure) and the social composition of the farm (i.e. farming working conditions) as key social dimensions determining the sustainability of agri-food systems. These dimensions vary across agricultural models, reflecting trade-offs between economic and social factors. The study underscores the importance of understanding social mechanisms that sustain agri-food systems to support farmers’ well-being.