Ultimately, if this issue does anything, I hope it reminds you that our future is still ours to imagine. by Hannah Murphy Winter We started imagining this issue last year, before Donald Trump won the election; before he started dism antling FEMA, the EPA, NOAA, and every other agency that’s trying to help us stave off the climate crisis. And while the country has changed in drastic ways since last year, our approach to this issue didn’t. From the beginning, we knew we couldn’t look at the climate crisis in a vacuum. We can’t separate it from the rest of our lives, our work, our art, or the way we imagine the future. Treating it as a separate issue just makes it easier to turn it into something huge, overwhelming, and unapproachable; or, worse, something we can pretend doesn’t exist—or deny altogether. And so we built this issue with that in mind. We'll be rolling out the content online over the next week or so, and you can find a physical issue at hundreds of locations—from Tacoma to Everett—starting today. In it, we take on some of our region’s big, scientific questions about the climate crisis: Staff Writer Vivian McCall asks experts if we’re really on the cusp of cracking the code on nuclear fusion energy, as one local startup claims. I asked if the fires that happened in Los Angeles in January could happen here. But we also asked how the climate crisis shapes the art we make, and the art we seek. Senior Staff Writer Charles Mudede explored why there’s a trend of doomsday bunkers on TV, from Fallout to Silo to Paradise. And Stranger contributor Nathalie Graham visited the recycling dump to see how their artists-in-residency program is transforming trash into treasure. Through the process, we looked for little, compact seeds of hope. Our managing editor Megan Seling found one in a Bluesky thread, of all places, about how some scared, confused, half-pound pocket gophers turned the scorched ash from Mount St. Helens’s eruption into thriving wildlands again. We put that thread (written by science journalist Margaret Harris) in the hands of the talented illustrator Greg Stump, who turned it into a comic about surviving in a hostile environment—the same way the gophers kept digging through the ash. And we’re so excited to introduce you to Drippy, the Soggy Paper Straw. We and our (very real and not at all made up) readers had a lot of questions about environmentalism in 2025. Is it worth it to replace your gas-powered car with an electric one? Are the recycling rules still the same as the ones we learned as kids? How many microplastics are really in my junk? Drippy (Microsoft’s Clippy’s Zoomer nephew) is here to answer all that and more. Ultimately, if this issue does anything, I hope it reminds you that our future is still ours to imagine. Almost every story in this paper is a story about making beauty out of trash, ash, or absolutely nothing. So remember to keep digging. Hannah Murphy Winter Editor-in-Chief  Cover Art by Tyler Gross grossillustration.com ...read more read less