Tool-making has long been regarded as a signature trait of the human species.

Increasingly, this ability has been documented in non-humans and more-than-humans

too. What tools might we make together in this supposed age of the human, the

Anthropocene? What tools are we most urgently in need of in this geological epoch when humans are forcefully shaping and re-shaping earth’s systems?

Global warming and other anthropocene challenges, including the ongoing mass

extinction event, often lead to apocalyptic visions, despair, or apathy. We may be roughly eighty, two hundred, five hundred years—or far longer—into the profound planetary transformations named by the Anthropocene. The origins of the age of the human are disputed, but Toolmakers’ primary concern is not to date its onset. Instead, it is our shared conviction that considering a longer history of the now can help us better to represent and so to respond to our troubled and toxic contemporary moment.

Amidst our sense of dystopian urgency, Ecotopian Toolmakers aim to recall the role of

utopian narratives in the environmental imaginary, including the environmental sciences. Looking toward the future, we ask how utopian thought might prompt the kinds of integrated and participatory production of knowledge that Anthropocene entanglements require. We want to shed light on the pasts and futures of utopian thought not as an escape from the urgency and violence of the Anthropocene, but as a productive response. If utopian desires lie behind environmental actions, including the production of knowledge, they are rarely constructed consciously and creatively. Might a utopian turn help us navigate warmer, rising waters? Can it help build refuge?

Makers and users of Ecotopian Tools explore how the utopian imaginary can help make

worlds simultaneously less carbon-intensive, more equitable, more mutually entangled, and openly available for visions of other possible futures. Together, we are asking: Can the utopian imaginary help to conceptualize environmental problems so that their solutions are participatory? Democratic? Collaborative? Multi-lingual? Open-ended? Attuned to environmental injustice, slow violence and toxic legacies? Hopeful?

With project grants to Toolmakers from the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, we have been exploring these questions while making, and using, Ecotopian Tools since 2017. We are pleased to present this gallery awash with big ideas and the Ecotopian Tools of our 2018 Toolmakers. We hope you will use them well—and stay tuned for our 2019 Ecotopian Toolmakers programs.