Carbon emissions

At the Pacific Design Center Gallery in Los Angeles, artists have created an imaginary enormo-conurbation into which humanity’s billions have been herded, surrendering what’s left of the planet to wilderness. Views of Planet City, the resulting temporary exhibition, is all Blade Runner-esque, purple-neon cityscapes in miniature, VR games and costumes melding world cultures into one. The show riffs on Edward O. Wilson’s Half Earth hypothesis, the biologist’s 2016 proposal to remove humanity from half the planet to allow ecosystems to recover. It is an entertaining, clever and provocative exhibition, but it is fiction: it does not offer a set of instructions. David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky’s Cities Made Differently is

When we observe the ocean we rarely peek beneath its surface. As Helen Czerski shows in her lively and engrossing account of the physics of ocean spaces, we would not see much anyway. Sounds travel well in water, and blue whales talk to one another across thousands of miles; but light soon disappears, apart from the glow emitted by luminous fish. Historians of the oceans (myself included) have looked at how, when and why people have crossed the surface of these spaces, uninhabitable except in the security of a boat or on islands, such as those in Polynesia with which Czerski begins her book. But we need to dive deeper.