All environmental projects operate with a view to the future, whether implicit or explicit. Infrastructure projects, in particular, are both a useful lens for understanding these different views and can be powerful tools for foregrounding some future visions and sidelining others. In a roundtable drawing on research from Egypt, Indonesia, the United States, Palestine, Israel, and the Canadian arctic, we will use infrastructure as our touchstone to discuss how certain accounts of the future gain authority while others are discounted. The hopes and fears of both project architects and inhabitants of the landscapes being altered will feature centrally. We will engage with the ways in which infrastructure shapes expectations for future abundance and scarcity of resources. This will include discussion of the roles of mediation and obscuration that infrastructure may play, as well as potential path dependencies that shape decision-making around infrastructure projects. The roundtable will attend closely to questions of power, investigating how people in different positions of power use infrastructure to amplify their own or mute others’ visions of resource scarcity, abundance, and threat. We will explore the possibility that there are differences across types of infrastructures (electricity, water, roads, etc.), scales (of project and of governance), or locations (urban, rural, periurban, oceanic) in the extent to which certain actors can control infrastructural futures. Focusing on temporality, this roundtable asks: what time horizons are different actors operating within, and how might those shape the ways in which narratives of tradition, indigeneity, religion, and techno-optimism are deployed by residents, states, and international actors? Finally, panelists will discuss our roles as citizen scholars, asking how we can have conversations about risk, scarcity, and abundance that go beyond academia.