Landslides and Horizons of the West

Chapter 1, “Landslides and Horizons of the West,” examines Lewis Baltz’s landscape photography in The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California and Candlestick Point and Octavia Butler’s Earthseed novels of the speculative near future alongside Indigenous studies sources about traditional Indigenous land management in the region. This constellation of texts demonstrates how even progressively minded discourses of erosion and climate change often rely on narratives of California exceptionalism and the erasure of Indigenous claims to homelands, creating a “horizon line” of settler possibility and vision. This chapter closes with a short meditation on Esselen/Chumash author Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians and attempts to think outside of a collective anxiety of loss over an eroding Pacific future, focusing instead on a return of land to Native people of the region.