Alternative Futures brings together 35 essays on India’s future, written by a diverse set of authors: activists, researchers, media persons, those who have influenced policies, and those working at the grassroots. Divided into four sections—Ecological Futures, Political Futures, Economic Futures, and Socio-Cultural Futures—the book covers a wide range of issues including environmental governance, biodiversity, democracy and power, law, agriculture, pastoralism, industry, languages, learning and education, knowledge, health and sexuality among others.

Birds in Our Lives is an account of bird conservation in India, written by conservationist Ashish Kothari. It educates the reader on the importance of birds in Indian culture and economy and highlights the imminent threats to their habitats and populations, as well as growing efforts to conserve birdlife.

Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene addresses a set of contemporary issues involving knowledge and science from a constructivist-pragmatist perspective often labeled “relativism.”

This short film combines remote sensing, qualitative interviews, desk research, and illustrations to show the complexities and controversies surrounding mangrove reforestation in Senegal and The Gambia.

In this special section on affective ecologies, Julia Hobson Haggerty, Elizabeth Lynne Rink, Robert McAnally, and Elizabeth Bird study the restoration of bison/buffalo by the Sioux and Assiniboine tribes to their reservation in Montana in the United States. They argue that ecological restoration can promote and facilitate emergent and dynamic processes of reconnection at the scale of individuals, across species and within communities.

By privileging music as a focus for applied ecology, Robin Ryan aims to deepen perspectives on the musical representation of land in an age of complex environmental challenge.

John Ryan examines biopoetry experiments that encoded poetry into DNA, asking if biopoetry and the encipherment process are conceptual and methodological experimentations, or if they reflect ecological consciousness and ethical imperative for life.