Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West

Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West contributes to discussions in the environmental humanities and western U.S. studies about how we read past cultural history in light of our determined yet unknown future under climate catastrophe.

Examining an eclectic but interrelated and interdisciplinary range of photographs, films, and novels of the West; Western historiography; geological science; Tony Kushner's Angels in America; the Los Angeles freeway system and the city's layered temporalities; and the long poem form among contemporary Indigenous poets, William R. Handley argues that artists within mostly twentieth-century settler cultures saw on past horizons of the West premonitions of catastrophe—without, of course, knowing what their civilization was doing to the atmosphere and what that portended for the planet's future.

The possibilities and limits of their artistic forms, Handley shows us, offer a way for us to find hope in the wreckage of the past and to forge a future grounded in environmental realism.