--- title: "Future Tense" canonical: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/20/futures" publication: "The Docket" publisher: "The Docket" language: "en-US" guide: "https://anchor.is/docket/llms.txt" permalink: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/20/futures" issue: 20 section: "futures" description: "Imagining plausible climate-changed futures to illuminate choices we face today" authors: ["David Kern"] published: 2026-02-23 updated: 2026-02-23 articles: 10 --- # The Docket > The Docket is a weekly publication about the decisions climate change is already putting in front of Americans: whether to buy the generator, whether the flood insurance is enough, whether to stay in the city you love. It follows the people making those choices now. It treats climate anxiety as a reasonable response to real conditions. It won't tell you what to do, but it shows the tradeoffs clearly. [Read on the website]() ## Issue 20 — Future Tense Imagining plausible climate-changed futures to illuminate choices we face today ### Reproductive Futures - [Intake]() — By [David Kern]() · Published 2026-02-19 · Format: Reproductive Futures The intake form at her doctor's office had a new section this year. Page three, right between Mental Health Screening and Substance Use Assessment: eight questions about family planning and environmental health risk. She'd been coming to this clinic for six years and had never seen it before. She checked yes on two of them. Wrote her zip code on a third. ### Professional Distance - [What He Can't Say]() — By [David Kern]() · Published 2026-02-17 · Format: Professional Distance He's been sitting at the kitchen table for forty minutes trying to write a text message to his sister about Thanksgiving. Outside, November looks like September used to—his neighbor pressure-washing the driveway in shorts, the maple still holding most of its leaves. Types. Deletes. Types again. ### Treating Real Threats - [The Therapist Who Treats Anxiety About Something Actually Happening]() — Published 2026-02-17 Dr. Penelope Baseline (Penny to her clients) meets me in her office in Boulder, Colorado on a Tuesday afternoon in March 2031. The room is carefully arranged: plants that don't need much water, a window that faces away from the burn scar on the foothills, a white noise machine that she admits is mostly for covering the sound of her own anxiety. Before becoming a therapist, she spent fifteen years as a climate scientist, publishing papers that people cited but didn't read, attending conferences where everyone agreed the data was alarming and then flew home to do nothing about it. She retrained at 42, got her license at 45, and has spent the last six years trying to figure out how to help people live with knowledge she still hasn't figured out how to live with herself. ### Data-Driven Relocation - [The Spreadsheet Has Forty-Three Cities and Seven Climate Variables]() — Published 2026-02-17 She opens it at 2 AM again. Cincinnati: $68K, rent $1,400, +6.1°F by 2050. She copies aquifer data into column F. Chicago ranks higher but the Lake Michigan allocation fights worry her. Forty-three rows now. Temperature weighted at 30%, water at 25%. She adjusts the percentages. Philadelphia still tops the list. Her roommate asked yesterday why she was reading USGS reports. "Research project," she said. The Wichita offer is best, but the Ogallala numbers keep her awake. She recalculates the depletion timeline. Twenty-two years, maybe twenty-five. She's twenty-one now. ### Further Reading - **Climate Anxiety in Children and Young People Is Rational** — [Source]() — Published 2026-02-17 Landmark Lancet study argues climate distress reflects appropriate response to governmental failure, not mental illness needing treatment. - **Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question** — [Source]() — Published 2026-02-17 People of color significantly more likely to reconsider having children because of climate futures, revealing overlooked dimensions of reproductive anxiety. - **Climate Anxiety Reshapes Young People's Life Decisions** — [Source]() — Published 2026-02-17 Climate worry infiltrates choices previous generations made automatically: inheriting the family farm, buying property, planning careers that assume stable futures. - **Therapists Are Reckoning With Eco-Anxiety** — [Source]() — Published 2026-02-17 Mental health professionals trained to resolve anxiety face clients whose climate distress reflects reality, leaving both parties navigating uncharted therapeutic territory. - **My Worries Are Rational, Climate Change Is Not** — [Source]() — Published 2026-02-17 Research finds ecological worry shows near-zero correlation with pathological anxiety, validating climate concern as constructive rather than dysfunctional response. - **Eco-Grief Is Real: Understanding Solastalgia and Loss** — [Source]() — Published 2026-02-17 Solastalgia names the grief of losing your home while remaining in it, as familiar landscapes transform into something unrecognizable. ## Other sections in Issue 20 - [Human Stories]() - [Cascading Effects]() - [Emerging Science]() - [Climate Past]() - [The Lab]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()