Horizons and Rifts in Conversations about Climate Change in Oceania

Abstract

Historians are increasingly recognizing how our visions of the future shape our visions of the past and how histories of past experience are framed by the “horizons of expectation” prevailing both in those pasts and in the presents / presence of telling histories.¹ In this chapter I consider these questions in relation to climate change in the Pacific, approaching our transformed “horizons of expectation,” our need to simultaneously plot a very deep, even inhumanly vast past and to confront the prospect of the end of life as we know it on our fragile planet.