What vanishing worlds ask of thought

Abstract

This Author's Reply responds to six commentaries on ‘The ontology of absence: Vanishing lakes, care, and the limits of human geography’. Rather than defending absence as a fixed concept, it treats the forum as an invitation to reconsider how geographical thought should approach vanishing worlds. The reply argues that absence has never been synonymous with nothingness. Water may disappear as lake while persisting as sediment, toxicity, dust, memory, conflict, obligation, and altered relation. Engaging the commentaries’ concerns with water materialities, elemental exposure, hydrosocial struggle, terricide, ontological plurality, and temporal intensity, the reply reframes vanishing as a condition that discloses not only finitude, but also the limits of the conceptual languages through which finitude is named. It develops unlearning as a loosening of inherited conceptual authority rather than a pursuit of epistemic purity and proposes restraint as an ethical discipline for geographical theory. Care, in this account, is not restoration, management or possession, but a mode of attentiveness to worlds that exceed our descriptions. The reply concludes that vanishing worlds require forms of thought that care without possession and forms of care that refuse mastery.