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If the bevy of contemporary crises seems to encode a future certainty—namely, the end of the world as we know it—there is also a bevy of unknowns nestled within that grandiose prospect of calamity. Approaching the future entails managing these various unknowns: uncertainty, ignorance, risk, and ambiguity (Best 2012). Myriad crises collate into apocalypse—or at least, the trope of apocalypse, long bandied about in the contemporary anxious liberal milieu, as well as their antecedents stretching back centuries. Yet, we can also wonder: where are these crises taking us? How is the uncertainty of certainty inflecting everyday life in the present?

Environmental governance is, in large part, organized by crisis and prediction (Beck 1986; Liboiron 2021; Petryna 2022), in which climate futures are extrapolated by increasingly sophisticated models. Yet these acts of prediction are strained by their own inadequacies in the face of cascading crises. They do as much to produce present worlds and political subjects as they do to offer a glimpse of the future (Trombley 2016; Taddei 2013). The ignorance produced by uncertainty drives projects that seek to reduce risk, yet these same onto-epistemic projects yield further ambiguities—unknowns induce the known, from which further unknowns proliferate (Best 2012).

Ambiguiuties, then, are a core feature of everyday life lived in the shadow of the imaginary of environmental collapse and our collective navigations towards (or away) from it, into the future. Yet this non-knowing is born differently and unevenly—yielded by the uneven distribution of life and death (Povinelli 2011). Some are forced to live with uncertainty while others are shielded from it. Toxicants are unevenly embodied (Agard-Jones 2013), or communities are sacrificed following the lines and logics of race and class (Solomon 2025). Or unknowns themselves, like crisis (Masco 2017), can be a tool for social control rather than its precipitate (Douglas 1992). Ambiguity, for instance, can be manipulated as a mode of domination (Best 2012) or used to legitimate neglect and creeping slow violences (Anand 2022).

This produces a range of dilemmas undergirded by debates about the nature of ambiguity (or a fundamental contradiction entailed by ambiguity): the future is already written (extinction and climate collapse will happen as it stands), so what to do in the meantime, or after it happens; or the future is open (there are variety of catastrophes in the cards, some better than others), so how to seize the trajectory of history and bend it away from further calamity. Some (Tsing 2015; Scranton 2014; Yusoff 2018) write about how to live before, amidst, and after disaster. Others assert that political action depends upon maintaining hope for undecided futures, orienting us towards the “good” future even when it cannot be fully comprehended now (Lear 2006). 

This year in Envirolab, we will explore the ambiguity and uncertainty produced by the certainty of environmental crisis. We’ll hew neither to one nor the other side of the above debate, but follow both uncertainty and certainty where it takes us, seeing how ambiguity arises, where, and for whom. Why is uncertainty considered something to eliminate, even as certainty or prediction are increasingly criticized as forms of environmental violence? Why do we continue to imagine certainty and uncertainty as opposites? Where might this uneasy coexistence of uncertainty and certainty take us?