The end of the world

The other week, I received a notification from Google Scholar that my article “Ambivalence, irony and democracy in the Anthropocene” had a couple of new citations from a recently published Routledge volume entitled “Resilience in the Anthropocene – Governance and the Politics at the End of the World”.

Since I have long have been thinking about writing about the concept of “resilience” in relation to the Anthropocene, I ordered the book. Though clearly relevant to my research, the “end of the world” framing speaks volumes about the deep pessimism and lack of imagination that have beset contemporary academia. I mean, I would totally get if people living through the Black Death would talk about the end of the world but today, unlike during the Late Middle Ages, we should have every reason for radical optimism with regard to the future.