The last few years have seen a surge in online protest, but how effective has it been? Molly Lipson argues that, while online activism offers an important opportunity for mobilising and organising action, it often fails to add up to action on the ground. With the ever-present threat of infiltration and state-surveillance, activists have to navigate a considerable minefield as they work to harness the potential of online protest. Illustrated by Fan Pu.

As futuristic spaces designed for Big Tech companies spring up beyond of the glass walls of Silicon Valley, Alice Bucknell takes a look at their purported ecotopian credentials. They find recurring tensions between the green credentials of these spaces and both their real impact, and Big Tech's broader actions, stressing the need to resist this corporate approach to green design. Illustration by Laura Coutinho.

Many people intuitively recognise that plants and trees are important beings; complex and connected to us in a range of incredible ways – and that they deserve care and attention. Yet legal systems tend to treat them as discrete objects or resources. Gita Parihar maps out alternative legal frameworks that might better centre ecological life, paying particular attention to those that uphold the non-human rights of trees and other flora. Illustrated by Rachel Lillie, edited by Eleanor Leydon.

In Jamaica, the ‘Isle of Wood and Water’, locals find themselves caught between traditional and modernist values, especially when it comes to building new homes. Teshome Douglas-Campbell explores this phenomenon through the lens of ‘Ancestral Futurism’, finding a new way forward that takes inspiration from architects and architecture from across the global South.

Even the briefest online search for ‘climate change impacts’ throws up a catalogue of harrowing events. Climate change is not something that ‘will happen’, it is well underway. It is already threatening human health, and health services, around the world. In this classic article from Issue 9, Pharmacist Jean Ong describes the changes she’s seen from Metro Manila in the Philippines. Illustrations by Inès Gradot for IFLA! Issue 9. Edited by Martha Dillon and Jackson Howarth.

Visions of alternative futures can be incredibly powerful in the face of the climate crisis, but what does it mean to consider a future without humans? In this personal reflection, illustrator and academic Tom Hubmann suggests speculative visions, storytelling and narratives concerning a future without humans are difficult to contemplate, and yet, in that difficulty, they redirect our attention towards new understandings of the present and the possibility of reshaping what happens next. Edited by Adrian Holme.

In this classic IFLA! article, from Issue 5, Vandana K looks at what happens when a supply chain that runs through the very heart of Indian cuisine is disrupted. Following an erratic monsoon season that culminated in profound flooding, in 2019 India found itself in the grip of a severe onion shortage. Since then, Onion prices have continued to fluctuate, skyrocketing again in 2024. Vandana K traces the roots of the problem to farming and trading systems that are vulnerable to volatile climates, and governments that are unwilling to intervene.

How do we engage and educate local communities in a fair and just energy transition? Madeleine Bazil looks at the work of Cape Town based Project 90 by 2030 to see how community organizations can provide the tools to fight for energy justice.

Can we smell the shifting climate? Rather than focussing on senses such as sight and sound, Eliza Collin is working with the UK’s Design Museum, Future Observatory and a range of scientists around the world to explore the changing world of scent amid the climate crisis. Focussing on changes in plant-scent, and subsequent rifts in plant-pollinator behaviour, she asks how we might use design to make these often-indiscernable, more-than-human worlds tangible, and how to foster greater ecosystemic adaptation and resilience.

Across the world, many Muslim-majority communities are disproportionately feeling the impacts of the climate crisis. Zainab Mahmood takes a look at the relationship between environmentalism and Islam in the UK and beyond. She talks to community leaders about challenges to participation, using Islamic teachings to inspire action, and encouraging greater cohesion amongst Muslim-led environmental projects. Illustrated by Laylah Amarchih.

Around the world, a wide range of ceremonies and rituals have long been instrumental to the sharing of ecological knowledge and connecting to the land. Mark Viales speaks to farmers, scientists, and those who perform Indigenous Ceremonies - the J-meen - in Mexico's Yucatan region, to explore the role these ceremonies play in the context of drought and broader environmental degradation.

How many ways of being are threatened amid the climate and ecological crisis? How can we make precious, non-human modes of existence more tangible? In this piece Aarti Bhalekar & Anushka Khemka discuss their film: Will We Disappear in the Cover of the Sky? which asks what it might be like to see the world through the eyes of Britain's endangered starlings. Composition and Sound Design by Lian Dyogi. Editing by Elspeth Wilson.

Bobby Jewell visits the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale on behalf of It's Freezing in LA!. He finds dangerous technotopian greenwash from the central curator's pavillion, but silver linings amid the various international international contributions. The Biennale will be open until the 23rd November 2025. Edited by Katie Urquhart.

Around the world, many are holding onto hope that a green transition is now inevitable — that investment into renewables and other clean tech has created enough momentum to sustain a meaningful energy transition, despite changing priorities in the US and beyond. In this article, Ben Jacob explores the harms of this ‘inevitable transition’ narrative — arguing that we must not get complacent. Edited by Jackson Howarth.

In our latest legacy piece, we revisit Diego Arguedas Ortiz investigation of the the drastic ecological transitions experienced in his home country of Costa Rica. Recalling a childhood spent walking through cloud forests and collecting bugs in the mountains, Diego asks us to think about the visibility of climate change, and the places in which we might look for it. He reflects that articles and documentaries remain focused on polar bears and penguins, while, in reality, ecological change is far more widespread.

What is lost when we pave over vital ecosystems? In this beautifully lyrical piece, Fendy Satria Tulodo draws on his experience selling motorcycles in Malang, East Java. He explores the ways we struggle to keep in touch with memories embodied in asphalt, as carbon-intensive petrol based travel, and the infrastructure to support it, continue to proliferate.

Jemima Skala explores the way we think about mountains, through the lens of Mountainish by Zsuzsannah Gahse, which won the Swiss Grand Prix for Literature and was recently translated into English. Drawing on other giants of mountain literature, such as Nan Shepherd, Skala examines the way that mountains become diffuse with experience, melding the 'human' and the 'natural'.

Having spent the last few years retraining in horticulture, Chloë Webster, speaks of a renewed despair towards the inadequacies of our political systems, especially regarding inadequate climate responses. In an attempt to locate holistic and progressive alternatives, Webster considers the community garden, whose quaintness belies a surprisingly radical system of knowledge production.

In this legacy article, first published in short form in our third issue, Lola Young, Baroness of Hornsey explains how storytelling can help tackle intertwined social and environmental issues, encouraging innovative solutions from marginalised voices. Lola Young has worked extensively with charities, organisations, and parliamentary groups to tackle issues ranging from modern slavery and Transparency In Supply Chains (TISC) to climate change, and diversity within the environmental movement.

Ambient music, with calming tones for an anxious world, is thriving in popularity – providing a rich medium to reflect and connect to each other and the natural world. With that in mind, Bobby Jewell recently got in touch with three contemporary musicians working in and around ambient to learn more about their practice, and how sound can be used to process the conflicting emotions and realities of climate emergency.

We reached out to various people in the climate space to ask them what they’ve been reading in 2024. Featuring recommendations from Venetia La Manna, Joycelyn Longdon, Adrienne Buller, James Meadway, Ashish Ghadiali, Diyora Shadijanova, Guppi Bola, Nonhlanhla Makuyana and many, many more. Compiled by Martha Dillon.

Ecologist Ana Kilgore explores the burgeoning field of landscape memory, looking at ways that large-scale ecosystems come to know and remember through their myriad interconnected components and processes. Edited by Jackson Howarth.

Many rewilding projects and other programs aimed at environmental recovery take a long view of history, and are set to be implemented over centuries. Liam Geary Baulch takes inspiration from the field of nuclear semiotics as he explores ways to communicate the importance of these programs, and the species and habitats they hope to protect, to our distant descendants. Edited by Zainab Mahmood.

In Western thought, the apparently immaterial ‘rational mind’ has long been isolated from, and elevated above, other ways of knowing and being. Anna Souter visits Embodied Forms: Painting Now, an exhibition at Thaddeus Ropac, to explore the possibility that art might be able to help us dissolve these boundaries, opening the doors to new ways of coming to know the climate. Edited by Elspeth Wilson.

Indigenous Communities and environmentalists are currently battling the deep sea mining industry’s attempts to establish the seafloor as a ‘resource frontier’. Nick LePage explains how the sensational discovery of oxygen-producing metallic nodules has extended this contest into the realm of knowledge production, and the light that this sheds on the struggle to define the deep sea. Edited by Jackson Howarth.

Environmental knowledge can be encountered in an incredible array of places and ways. Eesha Srinivas, a musician of the Dhrupad tradition, describes the process of coming to know the changing climate via environmental information encoded in ragas. Edited by Adham Smart.

In the latest 'Knowledge' issue of IFLA! we've wanted showcase showcase and explore scientific climate knowledge in a range of different ways. This piece details a collaboration between non-profit design research studio Climate Cartographics, who create visualisations and communication tools to address environmental concerns, and Indigenous weavers from Gadhdhoo island in the Maldives. Their collaboration uses ‘sounding’ to represent and explore changes to the orally kept Maldivian Nakaiy monsoonal calendar. Words by Climate Cartographics' Ben Pollock.

Images of melting ice have become synonymous with the climate crisis, yet repetition has also made such images increasingly ineffectual. In this article, IFLA!’s own Holly O’Niell explores artistic efforts to break out of this mould. She reviews Emma Stibbon’s ‘Melting Ice: Rising Tides’ exhibition at Towner Eastbourne (open until 15th September 2024), which aims to draw parallels between processes of polar degradation and coastal erosion in Britain. Holly finds that creative documentation of place and time creates opportunities to more effectively communicate and convey change.

Big tech companies have long used 'green' imagery to serve their own ends. In this article, Charlotte Rickards explores the green rolling hills and blue skies of Microsoft's 'Bliss', one of the most viewed images in history. She finds an unexpected, ironic story of globalism gone awry; a curious chapter in a long history of natural images divorced from the world they so casually claim to depict.

It's Freezing in LA! art editor and co-director Nina Carter reviews the first ever Klima Biennale Wien and finds refreshing storytelling, artist activist events and fictional speculations.

Rachel Carson's images of a 'Silent Spring' bereft of birdsong – robbed by harmful pesticides – are known for launching the Western environmental movement as we know it. In this piece, Rowan Jaines revisits Carson's 1962 classic, arguing that the book's success, and the industry backlash it provoked, can be credited to Carson's powerful synthesis of traditionally artistic and scientific practice – a synthesis that we might still learn from today.

The plant lives of Aotearoa (and the myriad meanings they embody) have long been threatened by Western colonists, facilitated by a belief that an ecosystem’s importance is defined by what it offers humans. Hana Pera Aoake describes a very different Māori worldview – one that emphasises the deep, non-linear interconnections between the people and their plant-relatives, and that continues to resist and flourish in the face of eco-cultural imperialism. Edited by Jackson Howarth.

The Israeli State’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories is a well-documented international crisis, and the project’s whitewashing and social justice implications are relatively well known. In this article, first published in IFLA! Issue 6, Zainab Mahmood reviews the occupation’s ecological component. Her words remain more relevant than ever today. She finds profound environmental tensions between the lifestyles afforded to Israeli citizens and those who live in occupied territories, and that greenwashing is frequently used to distract from colonial actions.

Metaphors are powerful, especially where the fight for climate justice – and justice more widely – is concerned. They focus our attention on their components; connecting, reframing – creating associations between these constituent parts and so transforming them – uplifting, illuminating, distorting and deprecating. 'Natural' metaphors can be particularly potent. In this short piece, Barney Pau explores the metaphorical potential of the weed, finding it rich with resilience and binary-defying multiplicity. Edited by Jackson Howarth.

Neurodiversity adheres neither to a single definition, nor a uniform experience. In this taster from our new issue, Elspeth Wilson describes how her nature writing and creative work intersect with both her sensory needs, and the environment around her, and speaks to Jane Burn, poet and illustrator, and Tzipporah Johnston, embroiderer and visual artist, about their own experiences. Edited by Zainab Mahmood.

Field recordings are atmospheric conditions in which to create an album – but they’re also being used to understand the world around us a little better. Gail Tasker looks into efforts to catalogue the sounds of our changing planet. She finds works that tell ancient stories, uncover geographical mysteries and record the drivers of the climate crisis. Edited by Katie Urquhart.

From gaming to virtual museum tours to Google Earth, the use of interactive digital spaces to record places, store information and build online worlds is well-established. But the metaverse is now recording real spaces and vanishing places. Nicholas Pritchard examines what museums and photographic records do to our sense of the world – and questions whether commercial cloud spaces are the right next step for our cultural and ecological memories.

Are you a climate tech acolyte or an energy maximalist? A climate urbanist or an eco-globalist? Eirini Sampson takes a deep dive into forms of ‘neo-pastoral’ environmentalism that advocate returning to rural livelihoods – finding a controversial and fragmented community. Edited by Jackson Howarth.

As the XR ‘Big One’ gears up for a more moderate approach to mass protests this month, factions within the movement have turned to increasingly radical activities. Olly Haynes explores how the thinking behind climate-based direct action has evolved in the UK and beyond. Edited by Katie Urquhart and Jackson Howarth.

We’re starting to see buildings being created with a better ecological record in the UK, and their designers have been quick to claim the credit. But UK built environment firms take a very different approach to building at home than overseas, argues Krish Nathaniel. There is a ‘west and the rest’ approach emerging, with firms using the soft power of ‘green’ at home to mask their ecologically and socially damaging practices overseas. Edited by Martha Dillon.

‘Climate anxiety’ is often used to describe horror at the environmental catastrophe we are living through. But what does it really mean to live through a crisis of such head- spinning, far-reaching and all-consuming proportions? Clayton Page Aldern digs deeper into the neuroscience as he seeks to understand emotional and physical responses to the climate crisis.

Edited by Alice Skinner and Eleanor Leydon. Illustrated by Byun Younggeun. This article was commissioned and funded in collaboration with Wellcome Collection's Stories.

In a climate crisis, many people who experience disabilities find themselves in uniquely vulnerable positions. Yet our bodies exist in complex, multilayered relationships with the wider environments in which we live. Elspeth Wilson unpicks her relationship with ecological systems and spaces, arguing that disabled perspectives can encourage a reframing of nature, place, and society. Edited by Eleanor Warr and Grace Duncan. Illustrated by Sally Booth.

Though greenhouse gas emissions are the main focus of climate debates, the waste pollution crisis was the original cause of the environmental movement. Dr Arianne Shahvisi digs into the UK’s shaky recycling infrastructure and its dependence on overseas dumping. She argues that it's time we put a stop to waste colonialism once and for all.

Edited by Harry Lloyd. Illustrated by Ifada Nisa. This article was commissioned and funded in collaboration with Wellcome Collection's Stories.

In recent years, the marketisation of ‘natural capital’ has made serious inroads in the finance sector. Adrienne Buller asks if so-called green financing can every really account for the dynamism and complexity of the natural world, or whether attempting to put a price on pollution will only fast track ecological decline. Illustrated by Anthony Padilla.

In Benedikt Erlingsson’s 2018 feature film, Woman at War, protagonist Halla runs a choir, wants to adopt a child, and sabotages electricity pylons. Andrew Key takes a look at changing depictions of direct environmental action on film, considering the influence of XR on activist narratives and our predilection for the heroic individual.

When we discuss changes to our surroundings, be it climate degradation or otherwise, we tend to think about changes that have taken place within living memory – over decades, rather than centuries. Over time, as decades pass, our standards gradually slip. This is ‘shifting baseline syndrome’; a tendency for conservation efforts to ignore the historic richness of our landscapes. But if we are going to look back, when should we look back to? Sophie Yeo explores what the phenomenon means for climate change, and what can be done to resolve it. Illustrated by Jake Alexander.

Louis Rogers was relieved that Rebecca Tamás’ Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman moved away from typical descriptions of nature as ecstatic. He reviews this 'intelligently digested' collection of wide-ranging ideas about more complex relationships with ecology from the celebrated poet.

'It delivers not only a challenging ecological message, but also a gripping cyberpunk thriller.' Chen Qiufan’s first novel Waste Tide paints a bleak portrait of waste build-up in China, highlighting its harrowing effects on both the environment and the people who live in it. Martha Swift reviews, finding a fast-paced, violent read, pointedly critical of the ecological destruction wrought by the waste processing industry.

This year, Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You made waves exploring the experience of a young Black Londoner dealing with trauma. But the recurring images of climate crisis and discussions of the environment in the show have been overlooked. Christine Ochefu digs deeper into the varied Black experiences of UK climate activism. Illustrated by Bobbye Fermie.

As people reach for their cookbooks during self-isolation, instagram influencers and food trends are seeing a huge influx of interest. Sharlene Gandhi explores the real origins of the zero waste movement, and the whitewashed gentrification that remains prevalent in environmentalist principles around eating. Illustrated by Hannah Percy.