Computational models play central roles in the politics of the Anthropocene. Whether used to design seawalls or to project climate futures, we encounter them across a variety of sites of response to anthropogenic climate change and other environmental ills. In this paper, we reflect on the limits of contemporary computational modeling, particularly when it comes to representing coupled socioecological systems or human-nonhuman relations. Modeling practices naturalize specific assumptions about what counts as data, can be represented, and counts as legitimate knowledge regarding environments and their contents. They are also shaped by and reinforce contingent forms of computational logic and infrastructure that could, we suggest, be otherwise. As a result, their projections frequently grind against other ways of imagining environments and their futures, such as those developed through long-term inhabitation or embedded within different ecologies and infrastructures of knowledge production. They also materialize in infrastructures that can be part of the problem rather than the solution.
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