Extinction impacts are totalizing and rooted in authoritarianism which undermines policy making. The impact of antiblack and antiqueer violence must be evaluated first.

With this definition in hand, we can turn to the first moment of my method: anti-apocalypticism, or the challenges posed to apocalyptic thinking by political theorists. As noted in the introduction, political theorists have voiced suspicion about the end of the world. The first critique is that the apocalypse imposes a teleological narrative, involving a necessary movement from destruction to rebirth. For instance, mid-twentieth-century liberals argued that the apocalypse plays a role in the “origins of totalitarianism” (Landes Reference Landes, O’Leary and McGhee2005, 22; see also Cohn Reference Cohn1957; Tuveson Reference Tuveson1964). Similarly, postcolonial thinkers highlight that the apocalypse posits a progressive narrative that legitimizes violence in the colonial world (Villagrana Reference Villagrana2022; Westhelle Reference Westhelle2012). In both of these cases, the apocalypse imposes a fixed future on history, closing debate about, and dissension from, an already determined movement. Invocations of the end of the world involve a dangerous appeal to the transcendental, something given without question, that has no place in democratic societies (Voegelin Reference Voegelin1952). The apocalypse imparts a certainty that a totally liberated society will result from the destruction of the old order. The idea that utopia is the flipside of disaster can encourage rulers to hasten the apocalypse. Totalitarian states and colonial regimes believed that the violent end of the world, involving huge suffering, was necessary for the realization of a world of harmony, with their accounts of the future mimicking the certainty of theological modes of millenarianism (Landes Reference Landes, O’Leary and McGhee2005). By contrast, other critics have emphasized that the apocalypse induces conservatism. This line of critique is especially prominent in work by green thinkers on the climate apocalypse (Katz Reference Katz, Callari, Cullenberg and Biewener1995; Malm Reference Malm2021; Rothe Reference Rothe2020; Swyngedouw Reference Swyngedouw2010). The prediction that the wild weather of the future will result in the breakdown of contemporary society unless something is done creates a state of fear. Apocalyptic politics, rather than presenting the future as something that can be negotiated and reformed, suggests that the world is set on a trajectory toward catastrophe. It thus radically reduces people’s options: either the apocalypse will happen, and destruction will be our fate, or it will be prevented. The climate apocalypse is “a thoroughly depoliticized imaginary, one that does not revolve around choosing one trajectory rather than another” (Swyngedouw Reference Swyngedouw2010, 219). Apocalyptic politics produces a “totalizing narrative to end all totalizing narratives,” and for this reason, it is “politically disabling” (Katz Reference Katz, Callari, Cullenberg and Biewener1995, 277). If the apocalypse is taken as inevitable, it produces fatalism and passivity, fostering the dubious feeling of “we’re doomed—fall in peace” (Malm Reference Malm2021, 152). Alternatively, if the apocalypse is understood as preventable, it may justify otherwise unpalatable actions (from increased surveillance to military interventions) to protect populations from the threat identified (Ophir Reference Ophir2007). Moreover, the totalizing nature of the climate apocalypse involves a false universalism; it masks the parochialism of the fears expressed (Alt Reference Alt2023; Mitchell and Chaudhury Reference Mitchell and Chaudhury2020; Whyte Reference Whyte2018). For instance, in the case of the climate crisis, the end of the world often expresses the particular fears of prosperous populations in the Global North and sidelines the contributions of environmentalists in the Global South (Mitchell and Chaudhury Reference Mitchell and Chaudhury2020). These critiques take aim at different dimensions of apocalyptic politics. The first critique focuses on the positive dimension of the end of the world, the fact that it involves not only the end of the current world but also the beginning of a better one. By contrast, the second critique focuses on the negative moment, or what Günther Anders calls an “apocalypse without kingdom” where the end “consists in mere downfall and does not represent a prelude to a new […] state” (Anders Reference Anders1981, 207).Footnote 3 However, despite these differences, both critiques are centrally concerned with the association between the apocalypse and an authoritarian reading of history. The common worry is that apocalyptic politics, in declaring that history is set on a particular path, undercuts pluralism, debate, and dissent. There is one path of history, whether toward an ideal state or a catastrophic end, that all political actors must, in one way or another, accommodate themselves with; the future is dominated by visions of either liberation or disaster.