(from the introduction)
The ongoing environmental crisis presents a degree of complexity that is impossible for the human mind to fully perceive, process and face. Exposed to numbers indicating and manifesting the alarming changes in the atmosphere, the oceans, and in species going extinct, more and more people are suffering from a new type of distress, climate anxiety. Nowadays changes are tracked, monitored and predicted thanks to networks of sensors, satellites, drones and to the use of artificial intelligence programs. In this period of climate emergency, AI allows the humanity to gain knowledge that would not be possible otherwise, and it offers a relative optimism that future losses can be limited. If nature can be programmed as an infrastructure1, ecosystems can possibly be saved for the generations to come. This programming involves, for example, smart forests being monitored by digital technologies, and smart cities getting more sustainable thanks to infrastructures designed to protect and restore urban nature. With non-human, more-than-human and human agencies coming together to form messy entanglements, one can ask: What does this new technoecological reality mean? Can these new formations be approached as programmed naturecultures of our times? As the technological and the biological become one in order to capture, manage and mitigate change, are humans getting closer to nature or more distant from it?