Over the last fifty years, efforts to create, plan, and manage coastal zones have multiplied globally in the face of threats posed by intensifying development and dramatic environmental change. Governments, NGOs, private industry, property owners, and many kinds of coastal caretakers are entering into complex alliances to define and mitigate the crisis. Unlike traditional planning paradigms that envision bright futures with ever-expanding opportunities, most contemporary coastal endeavors take place in the context of imminent environmental catastrophe and a deepening distrust of expert knowledge and technocratic control. In a sense, official coastal planners plan against the future, not as empty time, but as crisis-ridden and threatening. Planners purport to “work with nature,” even as they seek to shore up all-too-human boundaries between land and sea, deploying massive infrastructural projects grounded within (neo)colonial and exclusionary knowledge practices and political processes. For all their appeals to novelty and urgency, coastal plans frequently reproduce uneven and racialized distributions of climate impacts. This Theorizing the Contemporary series presents innovative anthropological work responding to coastal conjunctures around the world—sites emerging from the pasts that inform them, present openings and uncertainties, and the futures imagined in places where land meets water.