Spatializing the Environmental Apocalypse

Abstract

Due to the emergence of the Anthropocene, the social sciences in general and international relations (IR) in particular will arguably need new ways of facing questions that have to do with both existence and extinction in the realm of the global (Burke et al. 2016). Not least among these questions is how human beings relate to what might be called 'the end of the world'. Questions concerning the end of things (i.e., eschatological questions; see Box 21.1) are central to the ways in which we exist in the world today. Depictions of life in the Anthropocene often envision a future of environmental catastrophe where natural resources have been depleted and the Earth has been ravaged by storms and drought, finally turning into uninhabitable wasteland; an Earth where coastal areas are becoming submerged under rising sea levels, causing death, destruction, mass migration, and conflict.Such imagery bears significant parallels to the Christian biblical tradition of depicting the apocalypse, that is, the unfolding of the end times that precede the second coming of Christ. Therefore, the term 'environmental apocalypse' (or 'ecological apocalypse' or 'climate apocalypse') has been coined