Geocidal Ethics - (Provocations) by Joe Gerlach (Paperback)

About the Book

Geocidal Ethics is a polemical work of geography and philosophy that confronts ecological collapse by refusing the consolations of sustainability, survival, and human redemption.

Book Synopsis

Geocidal Ethics is a polemical work of geography and philosophy that confronts ecological collapse by refusing the consolations of sustainability, survival, and human redemption. Against dominant environmental ethics that cling to the preservation of the world, Joe Gerlach advances the concept of geocidal ethics, an unsettling thought experiment that asks what ethics might become if it were no longer tethered to the continuation of humanity.

Moving through critiques of ecocide law, sustainability discourse, and technocratic climate governance, the book argues that contemporary responses to planetary crisis remain trapped within anthropocentric moral frameworks that reproduce the very conditions they seek to remedy. Drawing on Spinoza, as well as Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy, Geocidal Ethics distinguishes Earth from the world, insisting that the latter is a fragile human construct already marked by its own ending, while the former persists in excess of human meaning and care.

Stark, unsettling, and uncompromising, Geocidal Ethics offers a radical reorientation of ethics for an age in which the end of the world is no longer a future event but an ongoing condition.

Review Quotes

"Thinking fiercely through a world that cares not whether most live or die, for an earth that cares not whether the world itself shall survive, Joe Gerlach's powerful book pushes speculatively past the moral extortions of the anthropocentric imagination to offer us a radical poetics of disappearance, a planetary ethics of the aftermath. Read it, please, while you still can."--Martin Savransky, author of Exology: Planetary Upheaval and Social Life

"This is an important, timely, and overdue contribution to contemporary geographical debates. Topics such as the Anthropocene and human-non-human relations have circulated in the discipline for more than two decades to the point that they constitute a beige disciplinary orthodoxy. With energy, earnestness, and humor, Geocidal Ethics provides a compelling way out of this tunnel and provides an ambitious clarion call for theoretical renovation."--Mitch Rose, author of Dreams of Presence: A Geographical Theory of Culture

About the Author

Joe Gerlach is a professor of cultural geography at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Spinoza's Geographical Ethics and the coeditor of Why Guattari? A Liberation of Cartographies, Ecologies and Politics.