A new way of thinking about the climate crisis as an exercise in delimiting knowable, and habitable, worlds As carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, Earth’s fragile ecosystems are growing increasingly unstable and unpredictable. Horizon Work explores how climate change is disrupting our fundamental ability to project how the environment will act over time, and how these rapidly faltering predictions are colliding with the dangerous new realities of emergency response. Anthropologist Adriana Petryna examines the climate crisis through the lens of “horizoning,” a mode of reckoning that considers unnatural disasters against a horizon of expectation in which people and societies can act. She talks to wildfire scientists who, amid chaotic fire seasons and shifting fire behaviors, are revising predictive models calibrated to conditions that no longer exist. Petryna tells the stories of wildland firefighters who could once rely on memory of previous fires to gauge the behaviors of the next. Trust in patterns has become an occupational hazard. Sometimes, the very concept of projection becomes untenable. Yet if all we see is doom, we will overlook something crucial about the scientific and ethical labor needed to hold back climate chaos. Here is where the work of horizoning begins. From experiments probing our planetary points of no return to disaster ecologies where the stark realities of climate change are being confronted, Horizon Work reveals how this new way of thinking has the power to reverse harmful legacies while turning voids where projection falters into spaces of collective action and recoverable futures.

"This book argues that a world characterized by runaway climate change needs radically new models of scientific and practical expertise to effectively address the emergency"--

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES • NPR • THE GUARDIAN From pole to pole and across decades of lived experience, National Book Award-winning author Barry Lopez delivers his most far-ranging, yet personal, work to date. Horizon moves indelibly, immersively, through the author’s travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica. Along the way, Lopez probes the long history of humanity’s thirst for exploration, including the prehistoric peoples who trekked across Skraeling Island in northern Canada, the colonialists who plundered Central Africa, an enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into isolationist Japan, and today’s ecotourists in the tropics. And always, throughout his journeys to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world.

In Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation, Andrea Davis imagines new reciprocal relationships beyond the competitive forms of belonging suggested by the nation-state. The book employs the tropes of horizon, sea, and sound as a critique of nation-state discourses and formations, including multicultural citizenship, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the hierarchical nuclear family. Drawing on Tina Campt’s discussion of Black feminist futurity, Davis offers the concept future now, which is both central to Black freedom and a joint social justice project that rejects existing structures of white supremacy. Calling for new affiliations of community among Black, Indigenous, and other racialized women, and offering new reflections on the relationship between the Caribbean and Canada, she articulates a diaspora poetics that privileges our shared humanity. In advancing these claims, Davis turns to the expressive cultures (novels, poetry, theater, and music) of Caribbean and African women artists in Canada, including work by Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Esi Edugyan, Ramabai Espinet, Nalo Hopkinson, Amai Kuda, and Djanet Sears. Davis considers the ways in which the diasporic characters these artists create redraw the boundaries of their horizons, invoke the fluid histories of the Caribbean Sea to overcome the brutalization of plantation histories, use sound to enter and reenter archives, and shapeshift to survive in the face of conquest. The book will interest readers of literary and cultural studies, critical race theories, and Black diasporic studies.

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Sensual, meditative, and powerfully evocative photographic studies of the ocean by professional surfer Danny Fuller. Danny Fuller's work as a photographer and artist is best understood through his thirty years as a professional surfer. Fuller who is known for riding the waves of North Shore Oahu's famous Pipeline and Maui's treacherous Jaws sees and experiences the ocean in ways intimate and infinite. Fuller's nocturnal seascapes of the worlds most savage and beautiful waves, all captured exclusively by moonlight with slow exposures, share the soulful beauty of the ocean, in meditative, painterly studies of subtle changes of light and color. In the tradition of artists drawn to the sea for inspiration, Fuller expresses a surfer's deep spiritual connection to the ocean and to the meaning of consequence in surfing. The sensual allure of blue mixed with the ominous presence of water, whose scale is epic, reminds us just how minuscule and insignificant we are relative to the powers of the sea.

This volume is the first book-length analysis of the problematic concept of the ‘horizon’ in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, as well as in phenomenology generally. A recent arrival on the conceptual scene, the horizon still eludes robust definition. The author shows in this authoritative exploration of the topic that Husserl, the originator of phenomenology, placed the notion of the horizon at the centre of philosophical enquiry. He also demonstrates the rightful centrality of the concept of the horizon, all too often viewed as an imprecise metaphor of tangential significance. His systematic analysis deploys both early and late work by Husserl, as well as hitherto unpublished manuscripts. Opening out the question to include that of the origins of the horizon, the book explores the horizon as philosophical theme or notion, as a figure of intentionality, and as a signification of one’s consciousness of the world—our ‘world-horizon’. It argues that the central philosophical significance of the problematic of the horizon makes itself apparent in realizing how this problematic enriches our philosophical understanding of subjectivity. Systematic, thorough, and revealing, this study of the significance of a core concept in phenomenology will be relevant not only to the phenomenological community, but also to anyone interested in the intersections of phenomenology and other philosophical traditions, such as hermeneutics and pragmatism.​