Dear reader,

For the sake of self-preservation we often seek ways to evade burdensome truths. We paint over prickly facts and banish their stubborn consequences from view. What more effective place to encourage denial than a university, where to advance is to externalize variables with chilling calculation and optimize messy life into a few ordered, controllable elements. Of course this incentive structure narrows our horizons, encouraging us to withdraw from what lies beyond our immediate concerns. But what’s the alternative?

This issue, the Nass’s writers try to answer that question, sizing up the external and then shaking it down. They arrive at myriad conclusions. Deep discomfort accompanies oceans of plastic and dimly lit starship interrogation chambers. Slopes of scree yield wonder. Thistle-ridden fields prompt care and then heartwrench. What to do with these data is unclear and conflicting, but what unites them is a shared attentional process of collection and study that refuses withdrawal.

The rhetoric of denial is an effective political mechanism for concealing our responsibilities to the broader social and ecological web of relations that we inhabit. This issue asks whether a mode of external record-keeping could counteract political denialism, enabling us to fully understand and fulfill those responsibilities. 

Cheers,

Alex Norbrook and Frankie Solinsky Duryea, EICs