From Crime and Punishment to Future Archaeologies: Reimagining Relationships of Waste and Value

Awareness of the need for action in the face of the climate crisis is undoubtedly growing. The latest IPCC reports have received more publicity than ever and advocates for sustainability and planetary justice have become globally recognised, household names. Unfortunately, awareness does not, in itself, provide a way of navigating a course among and between intermeshed and not-yet-imagined possible futures. In this chapter, I describe Participatory Speculative Fiction as a method of co-creating visions of place that can bring these possible futures into the conscious imagination and help us choose between them. I illustrate the method with fictional stories about waste, generated by participants in an ongoing project. The Anthropocene has seen a coupled explosion of consumption and waste; humans now create waste not only at scales never seen before, but also in ways that were previously unimagined. Current patterns and practices of production, distribution, consumption, waste management and disposal have complex and profound consequences for landscape and place (understanding the latter as a post-human relationship rather than a geographical location) that are hard to imagine. I show how stories people create about waste can generate alternative landscapes of the past, present and future, creating a productive desire for one alternative over another.