Author: Sullivan, Heather I. Title: Editorial 13.1 ©Ecozon@ 2022 ISSN 2171-9594 i Vol 13, No 1 Editorial 13.1 Heather I. Sullivan Trinity University, USA ecozona.associate.editor@gmail.com DOI: https://doi.org/10.37536/ecozona.2022.13.1.4739 Urban environments provide both the best hope for reducing overall human ecological impacts and for seeing how fully linked the human is to the non-human even when it seems they are separated, as discussed by Ursula Heise in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet from 2008, Timothy Beatley in Green Urbanism from 2000, and Christopher Schliephake in Urban Ecologies from 2015. Schliephake claims that cities are porous sites exchanging materials and energy constantly across their systems so that “material processes constitute a connecting link between the two spheres [the “human-built” and “natural” environments],” and that “Materials like waste, toxics, or petroleum, easily traverse the boundaries between these different forms of environment and illustrate that their boundary is one of porosity and instability” (xiii). While potentially positive for efforts at sustainability and at reducing developmental spread, densely populated cities can certainly contain toxic accumulations and experience rapid spread of disease through their crowded populations; furthermore, coastal cities face ever more frequent flooding with the rising sea levels of the Anthropocene. When discussing portrayals of urban ecologies today, we must face the enormous challenges of representing their rapidly evolving existence in the face of climate change, the increasing threat of global pandemics, and the blatant inequalities revealed by environmental justice studies. Such challenges become increasingly urgent as the polar regions explode with heat so that their cold spreads down into unprepared southern cities like my own San Antonio, Texas, where many people froze to death in 2021; and as the war in Ukraine smashes land, buildings, and people so that human bodies are left scattered about the urban landscape as if melting from missiles and fire. Witnessing urban violence and destruction occurring with brutal speed in real time, we also face the latest IPCC report on the rapidly closing window of opportunity to slow climate disruption across the planet. Yet, I want to feature not just the war-torn, pandemic-damaged, and overheating or flooding cities in these editorial comments but rather the hope that urban communities offer for large numbers of people seeking the possibility of lower-impact lives rich with culture and green spaces alike. While our last volume, Ecozon@ 12.2, 2021, addresses primarily the dramatic and inspiring implications of both ancient and anthropocenic rural areas depicted in the Eco- Georgic, our current issue considers Hip Hop Ecologies and thus primarily urban environments. In the cities across the world, we see environmental injustice brutally mapped across neighborhoods and yet also the potential for attending to the myriad voices who speak there, and what they say and sing about power, energy, ecologies, and representation. Our special themed section guest edited by Timo Müller and Alain-Philippe Durand presents an exciting array of essays on the very urban genre of Hip Hop music. Their introduction corrects the overly simplistic assumption that Hip Hop focuses exclusively