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The papers in this special issue on 'environmental futures' draw liberally on cross-disciplinary conversations, yet their strength comes from their ethnographic depth and their characteristically anthropological willingness to consider diverse types of entities and phenomena in the same holistic frame. The range of places (Oman, Alaska, Egypt, Colombia, Antarctica, etc.) and entities (ice, oil, gold, governmental officials, glaciologists, salmon, models and scenarios, PowerPoint presentations, rainfall, etc.) engaged in these instances of 'prognostic politics' provide the kind of material that distinguishes the anthropological project of building theory through ethnography and comparison. In writing this response, I group the papers in pairs under four topics that bring out some of the especially interesting and novel contributions of the issue as a whole. The themes are: temporality and uncertainty; anticipatory knowledges; resource affect; and material signs. These themes refract the visions presented in the papers, showing details of the process of claiming multiple uncertain, agonistically engaged futures, and the consequences of these claimed futures. I briefly conclude by considering these papers as part of the current pragmatist (sometimes called 'ontological') bent of some anthropological work, and the heuristic possibilities provided by this orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how different natural resources figure in temporal imaginings. I ask: how do oil and water come to frame the relationships and chronologies of transformation and, more particularly, of causality? In order to understand visions of environmental futures, not only might we need to attend to the forms of planning, expectation, and prognosis that shape knowledge or senses of the future, but we may also consider how and why causality and significant events are associated with particular natural resources. Drawing on my previous work that explores the future orientation of oil-depletion talk in Oman as well as textual sources and ethnography, I argue that while water has been associated with pious rule and divine presence, oil has been considered to be much more transitory and the product of human interventions and policies, interventions and policies that emerge from a fraught political history. While water seems to motivate events and cause change, serving as an indication and vehicle of God's power, oil appears less a cause of national transformation, at least in its origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]