“As If Sand Were Stone” reaches well beyond New York and Lagos, speaking to coastal urbanism more broadly – a condition of planetary prominence and one under increasing threat from sea level rise, storm surges and subsidence. There are lessons we can take with us.

Wolves and other large predators make their presence felt in the wider landscape. We investigate how to grasp this affective challenge to living in a multispecies world where coexistence never comes in ‘neutral’.

As palm oil travels from oil, to seed, to market, this controversial substance becomes associated with moral notions of ‘purity’. We take a multi-temporal and multi-scalar approach to understanding this process: examining current and historical literatures on economic botany and lipid chemistry, we unfold the tactics by which these palms and their oils are purified, and identify how these are reproduced in current marketing trends. Purity, this reveals, is a dream. Though this dream is unattainable, it has shaped plants and their oils, human bodies, and ecosystems, all the while masking the troubling consequences of its doing so.

Contemporary nativist logics, evident in the Right’s responses to coronavirus, stand poised to converge with a budding conservative climate politics that conveniently pitches the militarization of borders as a core piece of “our” contribution to combating a warming and unsteady world. Climate change looms as a powerful frame in the nativist politics of the future, and anti-immigrant sentiment is likely to flourish in the conservative environmentalism to come.

The genesis and spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 have transformed urban social life across the world. In this essay, I show how COVID-19 epitomizes but does not exclusively define global reach of China's cities, which is weaving new interconnections between humans and non-humans, including viruses and endangered wildlife.