Spatializing the Environmental Apocalypse

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. The term ‘environmental apocalypse’ has been coined to highlight the similarities between the current environmental condition and biblical descriptions of the end of the world. This chapter shows that notions of environmental apocalypse are strongly related to a modernist understanding of linear time. Through an engagement with postcolonial theology, this chapter argues that a more politicized understanding of the environmental apocalypse comes about when the end of the world is conceived as variably distributed across geographical, social, and material divides in the present. To highlight the importance of spatializing the environmental apocalypse, this chapter introduces examples from the field of biodiversity preservation, specifically, the politics of seeds