--- title: "Future Tense" canonical: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/35/futures" publication: "The Docket" publisher: "The Docket" language: "en-US" guide: "https://anchor.is/docket/llms.txt" permalink: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/35/futures" issue: 35 section: "futures" description: "Imagining plausible climate-changed futures to illuminate choices we face today" authors: ["David Kern","Yuki Tanabe"] published: 2026-06-07 updated: 2026-06-03 articles: 14 --- # 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 35 — Future Tense Imagining plausible climate-changed futures to illuminate choices we face today ### The Presentation - [Sixty Chairs]() — By [David Kern]() · Published 2026-06-03 · Format: The Presentation A state representative brings a projector, a timeline, and manila folders to a parish meeting room. Twenty-three people sit in sixty chairs. The buyout form has lines for homeowners, landlords, and tenants. The shrimp boat, the cemetery, and the question nobody was going to put on the agenda go somewhere else. ### The Break - [Break Room]() — By [Yuki Tanabe]() · Published 2026-06-03 · Format: The Break A mandatory heat break in a western Kansas meatpacking plant. Fourteen minutes on the clock. Workers from the kill floor and the cold side sit together, cooling unevenly, talking about nothing in particular — a neighbor's dry well, a pulled irrigation pivot, the taste of electrolyte packets. Outside, it's 112 degrees. The aquifer beneath the town is dropping. The timer counts down. ### The Office - [Inside Summer with the Counselor Who Stopped Hearing the Air Filter]() — Published 2026-06-03 *Future Tense publishes speculative fiction alongside reported journalism. This conversation takes place in September 2034. Kit Archuleta is not yet a real person, though the conditions of her work already are.* ### The Waiting Room - [La Canícula]() — Published 2026-06-03 The TV says 107. On Univision the meteorologist shows the same map she showed yesterday, the whole Valley one shade of red. A woman in the third row knits something pale green. Her appointment slip is tucked under her thigh. Her number was called twenty minutes ago. She didn't move. ### Further Reading - **Climate change is destroying American homes. Who should have to move?** — [Source]() — Published 2026-06-03 Managed retreat and climate buyouts, examined at ground level. - **Heat, work, and worry: How is outdoor employment linked to concern about extreme heat?** — [Source]() — Published 2026-06-03 Survey data on 32 million outdoor workers and dangerous heat exposure. - **Kansas Farmers Dramatically and Profitably Pare Water for Irrigation** — [Source]() — Published 2026-06-03 Northwest Kansas farmers voluntarily cut irrigation and the aquifer responded. - **Boom or Burden: Climate Migration's Impact on Michigan's Upper Peninsula** — [Source]() — Published 2026-06-03 What climate migration looks like from the community absorbing the newcomers. - **When the Classroom Becomes the Crisis Room** — [Source]() — Published 2026-06-03 Teachers in disaster zones are handling student trauma with almost no training. - **Extreme Heat in U.S. Schools Disproportionately Affects Marginalized Students** — [Source]() — Published 2026-06-03 New mapping shows which students learn in dangerously hot classrooms, and who they are. ### Favorite Featured Stories - [Depth to Water]() — By [David Kern]() · Published 2026-05-27 · Format: The Slow Measure The well sensor reads 171.3 feet to water. No red line on the screen. No threshold that lights up. The slope just gets steeper every year. A Kansas farmer hasn't pumped in seven seasons, maintains two center pivots he's contractually forbidden to run, and watches the number drop anyway. His sister drives out from Wichita with a napkin full of arithmetic and a buyer's deadline. She isn't wrong about any of it. The aquifer drops whether he pumps or not. - [No Such Place]() — By [Yuki Tanabe]() · Published 2026-05-27 · Format: The Acute Watch She left the Texas coast for a valley in the southern Appalachians — two thousand one hundred feet of elevation, a creek her kids wade barefoot, a realtor's phrase about climate resilience that sounded like permission to stop being afraid. Three years later, a stalled low pulls Gulf moisture against the mountains over Memorial Day weekend. She packs a go-bag, drives every route out of the valley, and discovers that the creek behind her house doesn't exist on any flood map. Then the forecast is downgraded. The storm never arrives. What it exposed doesn't leave. - [The Hunt]() — By [David Kern]() · Published 2026-05-19 · Format: The Uncle's Digressions A boy follows his uncle through Montana timber that used to be too thick to see through. The elk are higher than they should be. The creek runs thinner than it did. His uncle keeps stopping to describe what used to be here, and the boy listens carefully, patient with lessons that never quite match the ground. - [My Favorite Season]() — By [Yuki Tanabe]() · Published 2026-05-19 · Format: The Favorite Season A seventh-grader in Houston writes about the few weeks each year when she can walk outside without checking anything first. ## Other sections in Issue 35 - [Human Stories]() - [Cascading Effects]() - [Emerging Science]() - [Climate Past]() - [The Lab]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()