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Paper short abstract:

A harsh future is inscribed into the landscape of Joshua Tree National Park. Nonetheless, the landscape embodies a geography of hope. Peirce's "mediational" semio-genetic sign illuminates the semio-ethical potentialities that inspire hopeful, responsible subjectivities in Joshua Tree visitors.

Paper long abstract:

Joshua Tree National Park, located at the interface of the Mojave and Colorado deserts in the interior of Southern California, is one of the largest federally-designated preservation areas in the United States. A harsh future is inscribed into its nearly 800,000 acres of mostly barren, arid wilderness environment. The parched, stoney, often hellishly hot landscape offers a potent experience to millions of visitors every year of what might or might not come to pass for the planet as a whole. Despite its post-apocalyptic features, however, the semio-ethics of Joshua Tree are not entirely or even predominantly dystopic. On the contrary, the park's popular discourse, which dates back nearly a century, represents it as a place of cosmic regeneration, eternal peace, and enduring, unending life—terrestrial and otherwise. As such, the Joshua Tree landscape serves as a stage for the continuous re-enactment of what the American landscape writer, Wallace Stegner, famously identified as "the geography of hope" in relation to the US National Park System and what the philosopher Jonathan Lear has characterized as "radical hope" in relation to the Crow Native American experience of genocide. Charles Peirce's post-1900 doctrine of the "mediational" sign, and his "Third branch" orientation to semio-genesis illuminate the processes by which the semiotic potentialities emplaced in the Joshua Tree National Park landscape inspire hopeful subjectivities in visitors, even in the face of increasingly catastrophic future-more-vivid signs of global warming.