--- title: "Future Tense" canonical: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/36/futures" publication: "The Docket" publisher: "The Docket" language: "en-US" guide: "https://anchor.is/docket/llms.txt" permalink: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/36/futures" issue: 36 section: "futures" description: "Imagining plausible climate-changed futures to illuminate choices we face today" authors: ["David Kern","Yuki Tanabe"] published: 2026-06-15 updated: 2026-06-10 articles: 13 --- # 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 36 — Future Tense Imagining plausible climate-changed futures to illuminate choices we face today ### The Returning Sister - [Future Tense: Water Rights]() — By [David Kern]() · Published 2026-06-10 · Format: The Returning Sister Her mother's water rights were worth more than the house and the land combined. The aquifer has maybe fifteen years of irrigation left. Her nephew wants to keep farming. Selling requires two signatures and a stack of forms. Not selling requires nothing at all. ### The Haven Basement - [Thaw Season]() — By [Yuki Tanabe]() · Published 2026-06-10 · Format: The Haven Basement They left Houston after the flood and drove north to Duluth for Lake Superior, the cooler summers, the freshwater. Three years later, their basement wall is weeping groundwater through a crack the frost heave opened. The sump pump cycles on and off all day. The lead pipe replacement is scheduled for 2034. The neighbor's drainage runs toward their foundation. The rain falls on frozen ground that won't absorb it. A short story about the water you moved toward arriving through every wrong seam. ### The Aquifer's Witness - [The Chalk Doesn't Lie, and She Reads It Every January]() — Published 2026-06-10 *Dena Windholz does not exist. The aquifer she measures does. Every number in this conversation is real.* ### The Incomplete Essay - [Why the Great Lakes Are Important, by a Fourth Grader in Duluth, Marked Incomplete]() — Published 2026-06-10 The water from our tap hurts your teeth in summer. Mom says it comes straight from the lake. It tastes like nothing, which is how water should taste, but most water doesn't. ### Water, Contested - **Great Plains farmers consider switching crops as aquifer runs out of water** — [Source]() — Published 2026-06-10 The best ground-level reporting on why "just switch to sorghum" is a sentence that ignores everything standing behind it. Grain elevators, crop insurance, and federal subsidies are all calibrated for corn, which means the infrastructure a farmer depends on actively resists the adaptation she already knows she needs to make. Read this for the structural trap, not the agronomic argument. - **Looking for a US 'climate haven' away from disaster risks?** — [Source]() — Published 2026-06-10 Pulls flood risk data and disaster declaration records for the specific cities showing up in "best places to move" listicles. Duluth, Buffalo, Minneapolis: the numbers are less comforting than the branding. Essential reading for anyone whose relocation research has consisted mostly of real estate marketing dressed up as climate analysis. - **Boom or burden? Climate migration's impact on Michigan's Upper Peninsula** — [Source]() — Published 2026-06-10 Most climate migration coverage follows the people arriving. This follows the people already there, watching housing costs reprice faster than local wages can absorb. The piece makes visible a question the haven narrative tends to skip entirely: what does it mean to become someone else's refuge when your own infrastructure was already stretched thin? - **Agriculture built these High Plains towns. Now, it might run them dry.** — [Source]() — Published 2026-06-10 Widens the lens from individual farms to the towns that exist because of them. Communities piping treated wastewater to fields, wells dropping a hundred feet since 2001, municipal budgets tethered to an agricultural economy running on borrowed time. The slow civic math of a place that knows what's coming and has no mechanism to leave. - **Rewriting the rules for water use in the High Plains** — [Source]() — Published 2026-06-10 The governance layer underneath the depletion story. Voluntary water districts, prior-appropriation law built for a different century, and the strange legal reality that the Ogallala's water is older than human agriculture but governed as though it were renewable. Useful for understanding why knowing the aquifer is finite hasn't been enough to slow the pumping. ### Favorite Featured Stories - [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. - [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. - [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. ## Other sections in Issue 36 - [Human Stories]() - [Cascading Effects]() - [Emerging Science]() - [Climate Past]() - [The Lab]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()