Eschatological Geographies—Mass Consumption, Uncontrolled Waste and the Capitalist False Prophet

Abstract

Recent geophysical research has indicated areas in which secondary waste-induced, climate-changing activities may be affecting previously natural geophysical processes, beyond more visual, primary phenomena such as wild-fires, droughts, hurricane strength and frequency and flooding. This secondary group of geophysical changes has the potential to act as a relatively new complex of forces likely to increase or accelerate rates of change in different pathways. These pathways include: (1) changes in ocean mass since 2000 driven by climate-driven ice-melt water; (2) Changes in tectonic plate seismicity affected by changes in water type and availability; (3) Earth spin perturbation and polar drift due to polar/glacier ice disappearance and increases in global water mass and displacement; (4) the effects of changed planetary spin on the “crustal deformation rate and mass redistribution on the plate tectonic scale.” Causative uncertainties in such scientific analyses concerning the extent of correlation with the role of climate change continues; in the meantime, however, socio-technical research platforms examining possible climate eschata outline the importance of waste and over-production from complex consumer systems. Over-production and waste allow the suggestion of a carbon trilemma underpinning the eschatological pathways and suggest the need for eschatological geographies examining the need to understand the social dynamics of mass consumption, geophysical changes driven by that mass consumption and the avoidance of accelerated climate catastrophe. In Geography, the sociotechnical and physical roots of global warming demand a fundamental re-examination of the ‘divide’ between human and physical geography. There are few geographical topics which require a more urgent combination of human/physical analysis than the potential lethality of climate change and the connection between over-production and planetary changes through the conduit of mass waste. Eschatological geographies could potentially lead to more optimistic futures through the abandonment of waste/emission/polluting systems, but they can also indicate where global mass consumption will self-terminate as a system.