Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Both secular and religious warnings of a potential doomsday ring in the climatically-altered, post-millennial air of the United States. In the discipline of geography, the idea of doomsday has been examined mainly within critical geopolitics, where the spatio-political implications of evangelical millennialism have raised concern. In this paper, I approach doomsday from the humanistic framework of place. My theme is that both religious and secular thinking about doomsday offers a powerful vehicle for the geographical imagination to create, contemplate and explore both real and fictional places. At a time when geographers bemoan the numbing psychological effects of placeless, globalized landscapes, the prospect of doomsday heightens concern for and interest in places on a global scale. Doomsday scenarios heighten sensitivity to “real” places – i.e. to emotive, morally charged, and experiential qualities of places, from rafts of arctic ice to contemporary Israeli urbanscapes. Doomsday scenarios also stimulate efforts to invent fictive places. The landscapes of post-apocalyptic stories are cousin to the wildernesses once imagined to occupy the “terrae incognitae” of ancient maps. They are bizarre and dangerous places that nonetheless stoke exploratory curiosity in audiences.