Dear Community,
We know — you're tired of hearing about the climate crisis. So are we.
Not because it’s unimportant, far from it, but because the way it’s talked about often feels stuck: the crisis exists, it’s bad, and... that’s it. Many of us are working hard to create change in our communities, organizations, and movements but the scale of the crisis, combined with the inertia of the institutions in charge, can make that work feel overwhelming or even out of reach. We don’t want to invite you to another event that just names the problem again. We’re all living in it, in different ways, at different costs.
There’s also an absurdity to it all — Leonardo DiCaprio, a self-proclaimed "climate activist," rubbing elbows at Jeff Bezos’ wedding, on a megayacht that burns more fuel in a day than most people do in a year, while Amazon rakes in billions and remains one of the planet’s biggest polluters.
So instead of staying stuck in another round of eco-anxiety, we want to ask something different, together: What comes next? What kinds of political systems will respond to this crisis? What paths are possible, and who decides them?
At Ayni, when we look at the climate crisis, we often feel the same sense of despair as many others. Yet, there are moments—intellectual breakthroughs—that help us break through that feeling of stuckness. These moments offer us not just clarity, but frameworks that allow us to envision the future with greater agency.
That’s why we’ve invited our friend and collaborator, Joel Wainwright, to come to Boston from Ohio State University. Joel is a leading scholar in political geography and has been studying the climate crisis for years, particularly through the lens of political and economic systems. His work isn’t just about the crisis itself, but about the political futures that the crisis is likely to produce. It’s within these emerging systems that the real opportunities and threats to dignity and justice will take shape.
Joel, co-author of the book Climate Leviathan, will be offering what we believe is a pivotal and urgent talk: one that doesn’t simply describe our ecological predicament, but instead maps the terrain of power, politics, and possibility that the crisis will bring, outlining four broad but distinct futures:
