--- title: "Future Tense" canonical: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/47/futures" publication: "The Docket" publisher: "The Docket" language: "en-US" guide: "https://anchor.is/docket/llms.txt" permalink: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/47/futures" issue: 47 section: "futures" description: "Imagining plausible climate-changed futures to illuminate choices we face today" authors: ["Wren Castellano","David Kern","Yuki Tanabe"] published: 2026-08-31 updated: 2026-08-29 articles: 15 --- # 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 47 — Future Tense Imagining plausible climate-changed futures to illuminate choices we face today ### Underline Weekly Chapter - [The Split]() — By [Wren Castellano]() · Published 2026-08-29 · Format: The Underline Series — Weekly Chapter A proposal twenty-one years old, in the handwriting of two people who are dead, surfaces at a routine water session in the Pacific Northwest of 2068. It splits the difference: open two of the abandoned lower Snake dams so the fish can pass, repair two so the interior towns get power. The room doesn't hear a compromise. It hears a menu. And the clerk who pulled the filing out of the archive, whose parents wrote it and whose grandmother buried it, has to decide what the official record says happened before her terminal battery quits at noon. ### Wildfire Neighbor Standoff - [Neighbors]() — By [David Kern]() · Published 2026-08-28 · Format: Wildfire Neighbor Standoff The neighbor's roof is cedar shake, twenty-five years old. His dead wife planted the junipers along the fence line. Both will burn, and neither is easy to bring up. ### Buyout Family Fight - [Sunday]() — By [David Kern]() · Published 2026-08-28 · Format: Buyout Family Fight In coastal North Carolina, government buyouts are already thinning neighborhoods one lot at a time, and every sale pulls the next house's appraised value down with it. "Sunday" is set in the late 2030s at a family dinner where the roast is good, the rolls took three hours, and the woman who made them has no intention of leaving a house her late husband built. Her daughter has quietly looked at apartments inland. Her son has a folder of comparable sales he thinks proves the offer is too low. Her granddaughter wants to know what happens to the yard. Nobody gives, and the deadline is in November. ### Reluctant Enforcer Interview - [Tammy Arceneaux Sends Herself a Violation Notice Every Sixty Days]() — Published 2026-08-28 *The Docket's Future Tense section publishes speculative fiction — imagined characters, invented scenarios, plausible futures. Tammy Arceneaux is not a real person. But the system she lives inside is.* ### Argument in Progress - [Three Similar Requests]() — By [Wren Castellano]() · Published 2026-08-28 **Mesquite Ridge HOA Portal — Landscape & Modifications** ### Adaptation Conflict Reading - **Who Should Have to Move When Climate Change Destroys a Home?** — [Source]() — Published 2026-08-28 Grist on managed retreat and why the question of who leaves first has no clean answer. - **Most People Fleeing Floods Aren't Using Buyouts — They're Selling the Risk** — [Source]() — Published 2026-08-28 Rice University mapping finds most post-flood movers sell to new buyers, not back to the government. - **What Happens to the Neighbors Who Stay After Buyouts Empty a Block** — [Source]() — Published 2026-08-28 In Edgemere, Queens, post-Sandy buyouts left behind vacant lots and the people who couldn't leave. - **A Massachusetts Town Votes to Bill Homeowners for a Seawall They Didn't All Want** — [Source]() — Published 2026-08-28 Duxbury assessed $2.9 million in seawall costs onto nearby homeowners. The neighborhood fights followed. - **Your Fireproofed House Is Only as Safe as Your Neighbor's Yard** — [Source]() — Published 2026-08-28 EDF on why one household's wildfire prep means little if the rest of the block hasn't kept up. - **Why Federal Programs Keep Fracturing the Neighborhoods They're Trying to Save** — [Source]() — Published 2026-08-28 Brookings on how disaster programs designed around individual properties keep undermining block-level adaptation. ### Favorite Featured Stories - [Big Rock]() — By [David Kern]() · Published 2026-08-21 · Format: Realist Standalone In Montana, a smoke advisory lifts and the sky is clean by afternoon. The river isn't. Eight days of trapped heat soak into low water and stay there, and nothing about the surface shows it. This story is set on the Boulder River near Big Timber in 2038, where a fishing guide with a thirty-dollar thermometer has four messages on his phone and no state closure to point to. The water looks fine. It reads sixty-nine point four at eight-thirty in the morning. - [The Obligation]() — By [Wren Castellano]() · Published 2026-08-21 · Format: The Underline Series — Weekly Chapter A creek in Idaho moved a hundred feet from where the maps say it is. A woman nobody employs has been measuring it for forty-five years, filing quarterly data into a system that still accepts her credentials because nobody remembered to revoke them. The data is accurate. The coordinates are wrong. Now a buried legal filing wants to cite her work as evidence in a fight over dams that could reshape the basin — and both sides can read her numbers and both be right about the part they're looking at. Chapter 4 of The Underline Series. - [Body Calendar]() — By [Yuki Tanabe]() · Published 2026-08-21 · Format: Surrealist Standalone Ninety-three degrees in the valley, the Cascades hazed out, tomatoes still green on their cages. She is washing canning jars. Mending a winter coat at an eighty-one-degree kitchen table. On Thursday she smelled woodsmoke from a chimney nobody has lit since March. Her neighbor brings nectarines and declines to ask the second question. Her daughter calls, careful. - [The Seat]() — By [Wren Castellano]() · Published 2026-08-14 · Format: The Underline Series — Weekly Chapter Cass eats standing up before dawn, because by the time the sun clears the Rattlesnake Hills food will feel like labor. They walk to the old railway depot in Toppenish where the compact keeps its records — water-use reports, grazing renewals, the institutional grammar of a basin that reorganized itself after the collapse. Their grandmother Della taught them that the record is what holds. Then a message arrives from family in Lapwai, asking about a filing Cass has heard about in fragments for twenty-two years and never read. The paper is one brick wall away. Both parents signed it. ## Other sections in Issue 47 - [Human Stories]() - [Cascading Effects]() - [Emerging Science]() - [Climate Past]() - [The Lab]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()