This challenging and highly rewarding work of political ecology and economy reconfigures the terminal—whose etymology connotes boundaries and endpoints—as a site of intersection, exchange, and continuation, rather than one of finality. Arguing against eschatological interpretations of the twenty-first century situation of both climate and capital, Diamanti proposes that paying close attention to terminal landscapes as sites of becoming is crucial to forming critiques of petrocapitalism that both adequately account for its material problematics and are poised to propose futures beyond its unfolding catastrophe. Diamanti makes his point with several studies of twentieth- and twenty-first-century termini including the melting Greenland Ice Sheet, car factories in Italy, and oil futures trading. These studies demonstrate on one hand how capital’s accumulation and crystallization depends on strategically obscuring material entanglements and, on the other, how studying the life and death in medias res in terminal landscapes can reveal them again.

- NM