Ephemeral Coast: Visualizing Coastal Climate Change

"Ephemeral Coast: Visualizing Coastal Climate Change" is a significant contribution to the Blue Humanities and to Contemporary Ecocritical Art History and criticism, offering a text that is readable and accessible to a wide audience, incorporating clear discussions and integrations of contemporary art practices, ecocritical theory, and environmental science and journalism. Chapters incorporate important voices in the decolonial environmental humanities and a global range of artists, theorists, sites, and specific projects. Throughout the text there is a conscious centering of Indigenous histories, critics and makers. Many urgent themes carry across its chapters such as commitment to ephemeral statuses of land and sea; contemporary relational research models and modes of visualization; the significance of effective storytelling; contentious extractive claims to shorelines, bodies of water and ice; environmental and social justice activism, indigenous ecologies and Land relationships and the agency of artists’ creative imaginations and visualizations. Ephemeral Coast is an ideal text for an art and ecology or environmental humanities course and a very lucid argument for the agency of the Blue Humanities.

Prof. Maura Coughlin

Department of Art + Design

Northeastern University