Desiring Plural Futures: Rhetorical Perspectives on Imagining, Activating, and Making More-Than-Human Life

From the perspective of rhetorical materialism and Indigenous social theory, the future is not a predetermined horizon towards which societies naturally move, but an ongoing process of material, relational, and rhetorical world-making. This presentation examines how ecological futures—made up of diverse human and more-than-human relationships—in New Mexico are actively produced through the intertwined forces of contamination and dispossession, particularly through the infrastructures and logics of the nuclear industry. More than a remnant of the past, New Mexico’s nuclear landscape continues to organize the terms under which ecological harm, risk, and responsibility are imagined and governed in the present. Nuclear infrastructure function as futurity projects that normalize sacrifice zones, frame contamination as manageable, and authorize technocratic control over land, time, and bodies, while disproportionately burdening Indigenous and rural communities.

Drawing on rhetorical materialism, this analysis foregrounds how these futures are not only discursively justified but materially enforced through extraction, waste storage, and long-term exposure. From an Indigenous theoretical perspective, such practices reflect an ongoing structure of settler colonialism that severs relationships between land, community, and intergenerational responsibility. Yet these imposed futures are neither singular nor total. Across New Mexico, Indigenous and land-based communities are actively refusing nuclear colonial logics and constructing alternative futurities grounded in relational accountability, land-based governance, and everyday practices of care, survival, and organizing.

Situating New Mexico within broader planetary discourses of climate change and global governance, this presentation argues that nuclear colonialism is not a regional exception but a localized expression of world-systemic environmental power. I interrogate what kinds of futures our current systems are structured to desire—futures stabilized through technocratic, managerial, and extractive relationships to ecologies—and how such desires constrain what becomes imaginable as climate action. Rather than advancing a singular green horizon, this analysis asks how we might invest in and activate multiple, relational futures for biodiversity and ecosystems. Positioning nuclear futurity and Indigenous futurity in direct tension, this research argues that desirable futures for biodiversity and people do not emerge through prediction or management alone, but through ongoing struggles to invest in, enact, and defend alternative ecological relations to place.