Doom

Abstract

The idea of doom is inescapable for those who take up the task of writing, teaching and doing radical geography today, because it presents fundamental challenges to the progressivist faith that animates radical critique. It forces us to ask what the collapse (or imminent collapse) of that narrative means for the project of radical geography as it has emerged and proliferated over the last half century. Contemporary radical geography cannot avoid the question of doom. It is already a part of every conversation in which it is engaged. Almost 10 years of research on climate change politics tells the author this eminently rational dread-the acknowledgment of the likelihood of the futility of efforts to avoid catastrophe-is fundamental to contemporary social life. The confrontation with a tragic collective doom undermines much of what many citizens of capitalist liberal democracy understand as the elemental building blocks of politics.