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.