Environments: tracing errantry

edited by Madeline Bruegger

Our climate is measured in tipping points: critical thresholds of damage that once passed cannot be reversed or undone. Global Tipping Points, a collection of over 160 authors from twenty-three countries and eighty-seven institutions based out of the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, reported in 2025 that the earth had reached its first climate tipping point. Global warming will soon exceed 1.5°C. Coral reefs are crossing thermal thresholds and experiencing dieback, a condition in which warming water causes the coral to expel their symbiotic algae, eventually causing bleaching, starvation, and collapse. Of course, coral reefs exist in an ecological entanglement, providing shelter for over twenty-five percent of all marine life. The loss of coral reefs indicates a loss of biodiversity in our oceans and irreversible damage to such ecological systems. Marking the first tipping point, coral dieback is only the beginning of climate tipping points due to global warming. As we (humans and more-than-humans) reach the beginning of several critical tipping points, these reviews beg the question: What does it mean to imagine, to listen, to speculate, and to think otherwise at the end of the world? And just a bit further, what’s the point? 

While the first climate tipping point occurs on the borders of oceanic ecologies, coral surfaces and warming water, each of these reviews investigate what it means to think, listen, and respond to water histories and imaginaries. In Isaiah Frost Rivera’s review of Cleo Wölfle Hazard’s Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice, Frost Rivera discusses the role of river underflows as a practice, orientation, and invitation to “hidden flows and their movements, excesses, and relations.” Combining insights from Indigenous, feminist, and queer studies, Wölfle Hazardutilizes underflows to theorize and interrogate oftentimes unseen settler-colonial assumptions about land and water management. According to Frost Rivera, the underflow sections include “anecdotal” or “speculative vignettes” which frame the chapters. For example, in “Underflow 5: Affects and Ecopoetics Practice,” Frost Rivera writes, “the longest of the underflows, asserts field writing as an ecopoetic practice that centers queer and trans affect and subjectivity within the normal sciences, one which offers a queering of method and an interrogation of relation by people who are together in the field.” 

Following fieldwork as a kind of listening practice, in Mia Bañuelos’ review of Listening to Beauty: Rhetorics of Science in Sea and Sound Bañuelos asserts “Megan Poole’s Listening to Beauty asks us to do more than just listen—Poole asks us to witness, to be active participants in the world around us by considering beauty in ways we haven’t before.” Through interviews with eight scientists studying a wide array of topics from whalesong to jumping spiders, Poole argues that perhaps to think otherwise about climate futures, we must listen to beauty. In a book that also centers listening, marine ecologies, and the power of water, Aden Morvice’s review of Inhabitants of the Deep: the Blueness of Blackness follows Jonathan Howard’s ecocritical study of the deep sea. Morvice writes, “He [Howard] borrows his title from Equiano’s description of the enslaved Africans on the Middle Passage who either jumped or were jettisoned from slave ships as those who ‘happily’ inhabit the deep. Howard interprets this figuration of the sea to describe the ‘habitable elsewhere’ crucial for understanding blackness and black life.” 

Shannon Potter’s review of Tavia Nyong’o’s Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World builds on Howard’s imaginative thinking surrounding oceanic histories and black liberation.  Drawing on both afropessimist and afrofuturist modes of thinking, Potter asserts: “Both approaches, Nyong’o seems to argue, share an ontological relationship with monstrous alterity and an agential resistance to that social categorization, even if those resistances differ in form. Nyong’o demonstrates a deep investment in the generative possibilities of tension and irreducibility, looking to the inarticulations (or “fugitivity”) inherent to fiction, poetry, and artistic performance as an essential site of imagining possibility within impossible conditions.” 

The act of imagining possibility within impossible conditions seems to be an act of listening (Poole), interrogating (Wölfle Hazard), speculating (Howard), and ultimately, imagining (Nyong’o). While these reviews certainly don’t hold the answers to reversing ecological tipping points in the ocean or combating global warming, they do point to how we can sit with and through such collapse. And further, how the answers may lie beyond humans entirely, but rather, wisdoms of such survival exist in our water, the land, and the animals that inhabit such environments. If only we can learn to listen, to think alongside, and learn to see our world as a messy entanglement of watery bodies.