The ontology of absence: Vanishing lakes,care,and the limits of human geography

Abstract

Large inland lakes around the world are retreating at a pace that is reshaping both ecological systems and the social worlds that have long depended on them. Their disappearance raises questions that are not only environmental or political but existential, revealing how deeply human lives are entangled with watery places. This article examines these vanishings as moments that unsettle taken-for-granted assumptions about stability, dwelling, and responsibility. This retreat of water is not only a question of environment or governance; it unsettles how people live, remember, and imagine what is still possible. The paper argues that the loss of water also reveals uneven vulnerabilities and unequal exposures to finitude. By viewing care as an ethical practice that complements rather than replaces justice, the argument develops a negative ontology of space in which loss and withdrawal are recognised as integral to human existence. For human geographers, vanishing lakes demand a conceptual shift: from treating loss as a remediable deficit to analysing withdrawal as an empirical and ethical condition through which responsibility, evidence, and justice are reconfigured.

Keywords

Absence anxiety Heidegger hydrosocial cycle negative ontology ontology political ecology vanishing lakes

Introduction

Across much of the planet, the great inland waters that once anchored regional life are receding. Shorelines retreat, ports now stand on sand, and livelihoods that depended on the seasonal pulse of water face uncertainty. These vanishings are not simply natural fluctuations; they reconfigure memory, ecology, and collective imagination. They remind us that social worlds have always been sustained by watery ones, and that when water withdraws, the very conditions of dwelling are transformed.

Human geographers have learned to trace power through flows of water, but it has insufficiently addressed what happens when water itself withdraws. The vanishing of lakes represents one of the most unsettling manifestations of ecological crisis: it is more than a hydrological shift; it is the undoing of worlds. Here, ‘worlds’ refers to heterogeneous, more-than-human compositions of relations and obligations, not to cultural perspectives on a single nature (de la Cadena, 2015; Escobar, 2018). Recent global assessments confirm that more than half of the world's large lakes have experienced significant water loss in the past three decades, driven by climate change, groundwater depletion, and intensified extraction (Pekel et al., 2016; Yao et al., 2023). These are not isolated events but symptoms of a planetary condition in which disappearance itself has become a dominant mode of socio-ecological transformation.

The empirical record is striking. The Aral Sea in Central Asia – technically an inland sea but historically known as a lake due to its endorheic character – once the fourth largest inland body of water on Earth, has shrunk to < 10% of its former volume under the pressures of Soviet irrigation schemes, leaving behind ghostly ports and toxic dust storms (Micklin, 2007). Lake Urmia in northwestern Iran has retreated so dramatically that its exposed salt flats not only threaten health and agriculture but materialise a sense of temporal foreclosure, a future that feels closed down (AghaKouchak et al., 2015). In Africa, Lake Chad has diminished by more than ninety per cent since the 1960s, destabilising livelihoods and fuelling displacement across multiple national borders (Onuoha, 2008). Even Owens Lake in California, drained in the early 20th century to supply Los Angeles, persists as the largest source of dust pollution in the United States, a paradoxical presence through absence that exemplifies the long afterlives of disappearance (Reisner, 1993). Other examples, from Titicaca to Poopó in the Andes, show that withdrawal is not confined to a single region but global in scope (Lima-Quispe et al., 2021; Yao et al., 2023).¹ The recurrence of these events invites reflection on how disappearance itself functions as a geographical condition that exposes the limits of human control and the fragility of planetary coexistence. This article takes that empirical condition as a philosophical provocation: disappearance does not simply reduce water; it discloses the grounds of dwelling and redefines what justice might mean in a finite world.

Human geographers have built powerful conceptual frameworks to understand such crises. Political ecology has been indispensable in demonstrating that ecological scarcity is not a natural condition but a product of uneven development, capitalist accumulation, and the interventions of states and corporations (Blaikie and Brookfield, 2015; Robbins, 2019; Swyngedouw, 2004). The hydrosocial scholars have extended this critique by showing that water is never a neutral substance but always socially and materially co-produced through infrastructures, discourses, and governance regimes (Linton, 2010; Linton and Budds, 2014). These perspectives have decisively unsettled apolitical or technocratic understandings of scarcity.

Yet, despite these advances, the crisis continues to be framed predominantly in managerial and distributive terms: as problems of allocation, control, or institutional failure. Scarcity becomes a puzzle to be explained and, ideally, solved within the logic of governance. In this framing, the question of justice is often confined to distribution, whereas disappearance raises deeper concerns about how vulnerability and finitude are unevenly experienced. This distributive understanding is necessary but insufficient, because disappearance generates forms of vulnerability that cannot be captured by allocation alone. What remains marginal in this framing is the existential weight of disappearance itself: the unsettling recognition that when water recedes, entire worlds collapse with it. The loss of a lake reconfigures relations between people and places, as well as between memory, imagination, and the possible. Such transformations invite ethical and political questions that extend beyond redistribution, asking instead how vulnerability, exposure, and finitude are unequally experienced and negotiated. Here, justice concerns the unequal conditions of existence themselves, not simply the allocation of resources, revealing harm as an ontological rather than merely economic inequality. In this register, the issue is not only access to water but the conditions under which entire lifeworlds are allowed to endure or are left to vanish.

To keep the argument conceptually focused, the paper proceeds in three connected moves. Across these moves, justice is treated not only as distribution and procedure, but also as an ontological question of what counts as evidence, obligation, and liveable continuity under disappearance. In environmental justice scholarship, justice is commonly unpacked through distribution, recognition, and procedure, and, in more recent work, through capabilities and responsibilities across unequal exposures (Fraser, 2009; Schlosberg, 2007; Sen, 2008). First, drawing on Heidegger's existential analytic, it approaches vanishing lakes as a disruption in the conditions through which a world becomes intelligible and inhabitable. Second, it turns to negative geographies to argue that absence is not mere lack but a spatial condition that reorganises relations, limits, and forms of vulnerability. Third, it mobilises political ontology together with scholarship on care to clarify what is at stake when loss becomes governable through managerial metrics, and what an orientation toward ontological justice might demand in practice (Bissell et al., 2021; Blaser, 2014; de La Bellacasa, 2017; Heidegger, 1973). In this article, political ontology is therefore not a general gesture to ‘ontology’ but a way to specify how evidentiary and metric devices decide which lake-losses can enter justice claims and which remain unintelligible as obligations. Within geography, negative geographies and work on haunting already provide resources for thinking withdrawal as a spatial condition rather than as mere lack. Human geography is not entirely silent on this dimension. Recent work in negative geographies foregrounds limits, gaps, and withdrawals as generative conditions of spatial life, rather than treating absence as a passive void (Bissell et al., 2021). Read alongside scholarship on haunting and the afterlives of loss, this line of work helps frame retreating shorelines as spatial conditions that reorganise what can be sensed, narrated, and governed, and what becomes newly exposed to forms of abandonment (Maddern and Adey, 2008; Till, 2005). In this context, Heidegger's existential analytic offers a provocation. In Being and Time, Heidegger (1973) describes care (Sorge) as the fundamental structure of human existence: a being always already immersed in a world, oriented toward its finitude. Vanishing lakes should therefore be approached not only as governance failures but as events that rework what counts as evidence, obligation, and justice under conditions of withdrawal.

This article, therefore, places Heidegger's existential analytic in conversation with political ecology, drawing on Indigenous and decolonial perspectives and justice-oriented environmental thought. Scholars working in political ontology reorient analysis from resources and management toward worlds and relations, asking what it means when certain ways of being in the world are eliminated through extractive and colonial projects (Blaser, 2014; de la Cadena, 2015; Escobar, 2018; Whyte, 2016). Such perspectives reveal that disappearance is never neutral: it is an effect of unequal exposure to finitude. In bringing these insights together, I seek to develop an understanding of disappearance that connects ontological disclosure with environmental justice, thereby linking the existential and the structural. This connection emerges because disclosure is never purely conceptual; it reveals how the conditions that make worlds possible are themselves unevenly structured, thereby transforming ontological insight into a terrain of political struggle. In this sense, vanishing lakes become sites where ontological disclosure and environmental justice intersect.

From this vantage point, disappearance can be understood through what I call a negative ontology of space. By negative ontology, I do not mean a celebration of loss or a metaphor for decline. I mean an analytic that treats withdrawal as a condition that reorganises evidence, responsibility, and the terms of repair, making absence materially consequential rather than merely representational. This formulation is not drawn from existing scholarship but develops at the intersection of political ontology and the recent interest in negative geographies. Whereas the latter approach examines absence and voids as epistemic or representational concerns, the idea advanced here moves toward being itself, treating absence, loss, and withdrawal as constitutive conditions of existence. It invites attention to how disappearance materialises anxiety and how landscapes of loss continue to act through their ruins, dust, and residues, revealing the fragile limits through which worlds persist and decline. In this perspective, absence is never mere emptiness; it is a continuing form of presence that reshapes what follows. This orientation does not reject the insights of political ecology or hydrosocial scholarship but carries them into a wider horizon of finitude and fragility, where disappearance becomes both an ontological and ethical disclosure.

Taken together, these moves reframe disappearance as both an ontological disclosure and an ethical demand, inviting human geographers to think with fragility as a ground for responsibility rather than as a managerial problem to be optimised. In this sense, the argument is not an attempt to replace political critique with ontology, but to reconnect them through care and justice. Care, in this article, refers to practices of attending to and sustaining threatened worlds, including the mundane labour of maintenance, repair, and relational obligation (de La Bellacasa, 2017; Tronto, 2020). Justice, in turn, concerns how unequal vulnerabilities are produced when some worlds are rendered legible to policy and expertise while others are translated into mere ‘resources’ or ‘impacts’, a problem foregrounded in political ontology accounts of ontological conflict (Blaser, 2014; de la Cadena, 2015). The following sections develop this argument by first situating disappearance within geographical debates, then by revisiting Heidegger's notion of anxiety, and finally by examining four lake basins – Aral, Chad, Urmia, and Owens – as empirical sites of disclosure. Together they demonstrate that disappearance is neither an absence to be filled nor a failure to be managed, but a spatial and ethical condition that calls geographers to think with fragility as a ground for responsibility.

Situating crisis in geographical thought

The disappearance of lakes has largely been interpreted in human geography through frameworks that foreground political economy, governance, and socio-natural relations. Political ecology has been especially influential in showing that ecological scarcity is never an outcome of purely natural forces but a product of historically specific relations of power. From its early formulations, political ecology illuminated how environmental change is mediated by uneven development, capitalist accumulation, and the interventions of states and corporations (Blaikie and Brookfield, 2015; Peet and Hartwick, 2015). Later work extended these insights to the politics of water, where irrigation schemes, hydropower projects, and privatisation reforms transformed access to and control over aquatic resources (Bakker, 2010; Dogmus, 2024; Flaminio et al., 2022; Loftus, 2009; Swyngedouw, 2004). Within this perspective, vanishing lakes are read as outcomes of political economy: failures not of nature but of governance, planning, and capitalist modernisation.

While these analyses have been indispensable in exposing how scarcity is socially produced, they often remain confined to questions of management and allocation. More recent contributions in political ecology have begun to interrogate how affect, temporality, and ontology shape relations with water and with loss itself (Bakker, 2010; Boelens, 2014; Peters and Steinberg, 2019; Steinberg and Peters, 2015; Yates et al., 2017). Building on these insights, this study considers disappearance not simply as an ecological or economic event but as an ontological disclosure that renders visible the uneven exposure to finitude and the ethical dilemmas it entails.

Alongside political ecology, the concept of the hydrosocial cycle has offered a powerful way of rethinking water. Linton (2010) has shown that water is not a timeless substance but a modern abstraction, made knowable and governable through particular epistemologies and institutions. Linton and Budds (2014) built on this to argue that water must be understood as co-produced through the entanglement of social practices, infrastructures, and material flows. Subsequent research has demonstrated how hydrosocial networks distribute both power and vulnerability, from urban water infrastructures to contested irrigation systems (Bakker, 2012; Budds, 2009; Zeitoun and Warner, 2006). Other hydrosocial research has highlighted the emotional, spiritual, and temporal dimensions of water relations, showing that water worlds are sustained as much by meaning and memory as by infrastructure and governance (Jepson et al., 2017; Yates et al., 2017). When applied to vanishing lakes, this approach situates disappearance not as a natural catastrophe but as the outcome of socio-natural processes: extraction, diversion, and allocation, all mediated by infrastructures and institutions. Recent work has extended these insights by showing how relational ontologies of water shape governance, vulnerability, and multispecies lifeworlds across diverse contexts (Öztürk, 2025; Rickard et al., 2024; Rickard and Ludwig, 2025; Rusca et al., 2025; Yaka, 2024). Here, ‘relational ontologies’ signals that water is approached not as a passive resource but as a set of relations and obligations that co-constitute what governance can recognise and act upon. In this framing, vulnerability is not only exposure to biophysical change but also a shifting condition of world-sustaining relations, including more-than-human dependencies and forms of evidence. These studies demonstrate that hydrosocial transformations are not merely infrastructural or institutional processes but reconfigurations of world-making practices. Across these debates, a growing body of work foregrounds water as a pluriversal and relational entity embedded in decolonial, Indigenous, and more-than-human ontologies (Öztürk, 2016; Rusca et al., 2025; Sabinot et al., 2025; Yaka, 2024).

Together, political ecology and hydrosocial scholarship have decisively unsettled technocratic accounts of scarcity. They have revealed that ecological crises are inseparable from histories of infrastructure, governance, and inequality, and they have given us sophisticated tools for analysing the production of scarcity. Yet precisely in their emphasis on flows, allocations, and institutional arrangements, these frameworks tend to render crisis as a problem of management: a puzzle of scarcity to be explained and, ideally, solved.

Political ontology approaches environmental conflict as more than competing interests over a shared resource. From political ontology, I take three analytic commitments: first, that environmental conflict often involves equivocations between worlds rather than disagreements within a single world; second, that governance stabilises a referent through translation devices such as metrics, assessments, and legal categories. Following scholarship on the politics of expertise, indicators, and commensuration, evidentiary thresholds are not neutral; they are institutional choices that format what can be known and governed (Bowker and Star, 2000; Jasanoff and Kim, 2015; Porter, 2020). Third, that these devices produce ontological inclusion and exclusion as practical effects (Blaser, 2014; de la Cadena, 2015). This matters for vanishing lakes because retreat not only redistributes water, it adjudicates which losses count as evidence and which obligations can be voiced as justice claims (Blaser, 2014). Political ontology asks how disputes hinge on divergent commitments about what exists, how relations are composed, and what counts as evidence, and it shows how governance translates these differences into commensurable units that can be administered (Blaser, 2014; de la Cadena, 2015; Escobar, 2018). Here, translation is not a metaphor but an institutional practice, including metrics, assessments, and legal categories, that renders heterogeneous relations auditable and comparable. This is also where ontological conflict becomes visible as equivocation, because the same term, the lake, can refer to storage, habitat, kin, or obligation, and governance must choose which referent becomes authoritative. Recent work on emplacement strengthens this critique by foregrounding world-sustaining practices that exceed commensuration and managerial repair (Blaser, 2024). For a grounded illustration of this translation work, Behn and Bakker (2019) show how technical assessment and legal procedure around the Site C dam in British Columbia encounter claims grounded in treaty rights and sacred obligations to river worlds, generating conflicts that are at once hydrological, epistemic, and ontological. In vanishing lake basins, this matters because retreat does not only redistribute water; it also decides what kinds of loss qualify as evidence and which obligations can be articulated as justice claims. Rather than viewing crisis solely as a malfunction within systems of governance, political ontology approaches it as a contestation between worlds: between ways of being that are sustained and those that are erased through extractive and colonial projects (Blaser, 2014; Burman, 2017; de la Cadena, 2015; Escobar, 2018; Whyte, 2016). In this sense, disappearance is not merely the result of policy failure but a manifestation of ontological inequality, in which some worlds are permitted to vanish while others are preserved. Justice, therefore, must be understood not only as redistribution but as the ethical demand to sustain plural modes of existence. Work on decolonizing energy justice from the ground up likewise cautions that justice claims become thin when ontology and coloniality are treated as secondary, sharpening what ‘ontological justice’ could entail in practice (Tornel, 2023).

What is left unexamined in such framings is the existential rupture entailed when environments vanish. When a lake recedes, what disappears is not only a resource but a world: ways of dwelling, forms of memory, horizons of the future, and orientations of collective life that are bound to water. To grasp vanishing lakes only as the outcome of political economy or infrastructural arrangements is to miss how they simultaneously confront us with the limits of mastery and the unsettling recognition of impermanence. In this regard, the emergent conversation on ‘negative geographies’ (Bissell et al., 2021; Clarke, 2006) becomes instructive. It encourages geographers to think with voids, losses, and disappearances as constitutive spatial conditions rather than anomalies. As Bissell et al. (2021: 4) note, ‘the negative cuts through and breaks apart the positive world we inhabit’. Read this way, absence is not a residual lack but an active spatial force that reworks what can be sensed, inhabited, and governed. By linking this insight to political ontology, disappearance can be reinterpreted as a form of world-making through unmaking, that is, a negative ontology of space that exposes how absence continues to act materially, ethically, and affectively.

This is not to dismiss the importance of political ecology or hydrosocial approaches. On the contrary, their insights are indispensable. But they must be extended into a broader horizon of thought that can attend not only to power and governance but to ontological disclosure. It is precisely here that Heidegger's existential analytic becomes instructive, providing a vocabulary for interpreting ecological disappearance not as a managerial failure alone but as a revelation of finitude and fragility. In this view, the challenge for geographers is to situate disappearance at the intersection of power and being, recognising that what vanishes materially also vanishes ontologically, altering the possibilities of care, justice, and coexistence.

Heidegger's concept of anxiety

Understanding the existential dimension of ecological disappearance requires returning to Heidegger's analysis of human existence in Being and Time (Heidegger, 1973). He names the human being Dasein, meaning ‘being-there’, to emphasise that existence is always situated within a world. Environments are not neutral backdrops but horizons through which meaning and dwelling take shape. This sense of situatedness reminds us that the ecological crisis is not something external to humanity. It is a rupture within the very conditions of existence. When a lake recedes, it is not only the landscape that changes but the framework through which life becomes intelligible.

At the centre of Heidegger's analytic is the notion of care (Sorge). Heidegger is explicit that ‘Conscience manifests itself as the call of care: the caller is Dasein’ (Heidegger, 1973: 278), which anchors care as an existential structure rather than a moral sentiment. To exist is to live amid possibilities that cannot be fully secured, always oriented toward futures that expose the fragility of life. Care expresses this condition of vulnerability. It is not an emotion but the structure of being itself, tying people to others, to things, and to places. Care also carries an ethical force. When environments vanish, it becomes a mode of response rather than an attempt at control. In this sense, care resonates with the idea of justice, since exposure to loss and finitude is experienced unevenly across different worlds and communities.

Heidegger distinguishes fear (Furcht) from anxiety (Angst). Fear has an object, such as a predator, a storm, a shortage, while anxiety arises when the world itself loses familiarity and orientation falters. He calls this condition Unheimlichkeit, or not-being-at-home. As Heidegger puts it, ‘Uncanniness is the basic kind of Being-in-the-world, even though in an everyday way it has been covered up’ (Heidegger, 1973: 278). Anxiety unsettles the confidence of everyday life and discloses its provisional nature. Yet this disturbance is not purely negative. It opens new ways of being and calls for different forms of dwelling. Anxiety, in this sense, becomes a form of worlding, a process through which beings encounter the limits of their worlds and recreate them through renewed relations of care and meaning (Escobar, 2018; Steinberg and Peters, 2015).

For Heidegger, anxiety is not a psychological state but an ontological event. It reveals truth as unconcealment (aletheia), the moment when a world is opened to awareness. In this disclosure, everyday securities fall away, producing Bodenlosigkeit, or groundlessness: the recognition that our ways of dwelling lack an ultimate foundation. This ungrounding echoes Derrida's (2012) reflections on spectrality and Kristeva's (2024) writing on abjection. Both suggest that what disappears never fully departs. Traces remain, returning as affect, material residue, and memory. Landscapes of loss become haunted spaces in which absence continues to act, shaping experience and imagination. To read ecological disappearance through haunting is to recognise that what has vanished still structures the living world.

Anxiety is deeply spatial and temporal. Spatially, it manifests as estrangement from the familiar: homes feel uncanny, landscapes lose coherence, and orientation dissolves (Casey, 2013; Malpas, 2008). Temporally, anxiety makes finitude palpable. It collapses the assumption that the future is endless, revealing that time is limited and that horizons can close. Dust, salt, and residue become physical signs of this disclosure, reminding us that permanence is an illusion and that dwelling is always provisional.

Placed in conversation with the ecological crisis, these ideas show how the vanishing of lakes unsettles more than environmental systems. A stranded boat or a dry basin is not merely a hydrological indicator. It is a manifestation of Unheimlichkeit, a reminder that the stability of place can dissolve. Dust storms rising from an empty shore illustrate Bodenlosigkeit, the ungrounding of a world once assumed to be secure. Ecological disappearance thus becomes a spatial expression of anxiety: a moment when ontological fragility materialises. It also exposes the relational dimension of vulnerability. Some worlds can adapt to finitude, while others are left exposed. This unevenness links Heidegger's thinking to political ontology, where the endurance or erasure of worlds is seen as a political process structured by power (Blaser, 2014; de la Cadena, 2015; Escobar, 2018).

For human geographers, these insights transform how crisis is understood. Political ecology and hydrosocial scholarship reveal how scarcity is produced through infrastructures, governance, and inequality (Linton and Budds, 2014; Swyngedouw, 2004). Heidegger's analytic deepens this picture by showing that crises also disclose the ontological fragility of dwelling. The experiences of Unheimlichkeit and Bodenlosigkeit resonate with affective geographies (Anderson and Smith, 2001) and with studies of ecological grief and solastalgia (Albrecht, 2011; Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018), which describe the unease and sorrow that accompany environmental loss. Heidegger's contribution clarifies why such experiences matter: they reveal the structure of existence itself.

Integrating this understanding of anxiety into geographical thought means recognising ecological disappearance as both a material and an ontological condition. Absence, withdrawal, and loss are not anomalies at the edges of life but central to the way space is inhabited and known. This perspective invites geography to shift its orientation from control to attentiveness, from mastery to care. Anxiety becomes an ethical resource, a way to remain sensitive to fragile worlds and to the spectral traces that persist within them. To dwell within anxiety is to accept vulnerability as part of coexistence and to imagine justice as the capacity to live with, rather than overcome, the finitude of our shared worlds. Read in this way, anxiety makes withdrawal apprehensible as lived experience, while literature on negative geographies and haunting clarify how such withdrawal does not simply end but endures as a spatial force through traces, residues, and atmospheric afterlives.

Vanishing lakes and existential ontology

If Heidegger's notion of Angst discloses the fragility of being-in-the-world, then vanishing lakes are among the clearest empirical sites where such disclosure is made tangible. Their disappearance is not simply a hydrological phenomenon to be measured in cubic metres, but an ontological event in which the horizons of existence – place, time, and possibility – are unsettled. To conceptualise them as such requires attention to the scales, temporalities, and varieties of disclosure through which absence becomes paradoxically present. In the following sections, the focus is not on management or allocation alone but on how worlds are composed and decomposed, which aligns the discussion with political ontology's concern for the endurance or erasure of worlds (Blaser, 2014; de la Cadena, 2015; Escobar, 2018).

Scales of anxiety: Individual, collective, and infrastructural

Individual scale. At the most intimate level, vanishing lakes give rise to forms of ecological grief and solastalgia, that is, the distress of experiencing one's home environment transform into something unrecognisable while remaining in place (Albrecht, 2011; Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018). In the Aral basin, for instance, fishers have spoken of alienation not only from their livelihoods but from the very landscapes that once anchored identity. Similarly, residents around Lake Urmia describe the uncanny sight of salt flats expanding where water once lay (Schmidt et al., 2021; Transiskus and Bazarbash, 2024), evoking Heidegger's Unheimlichkeit: a profound not-being-at-home in a familiar place. At this scale, anxiety is embodied and affective, experienced as disorientation in the very environments that constitute everyday dwelling. These embodied responses also carry an ethical charge, since exposure to loss and the capacity to respond are distributed unevenly across communities, which links care to justice rather than sentiment alone (Escobar, 2018; Linton and Budds, 2014).

Collective scale. At the communal level, vanishing lakes erode shared worlds. Lake Chad illustrates this powerfully. As its waters have receded, pastoralists, fishers, and farmers have not only lost material resources but also the rhythms of reciprocity and co-existence that the lake once sustained (Onuoha, 2008). The disappearance of the lake destabilises collective orientations, generating what might be described as communal anxiety. This is not merely the sum of individual feelings but an atmosphere in which social life itself becomes precarious. Heidegger's account of anxiety as Unheimlichkeit resonates here: communities find themselves estranged in the very landscapes that previously grounded collective identity. These scales do not form a hierarchy; they fold into one another as bodily exposure, governance metrics, and infrastructural decisions mutually amplify the experience and materiality of loss.

Infrastructural and ecological scale. Disappearance also operates at an infrastructural and ecological register. Owens Lake, drained in the early twentieth century to supply water to Los Angeles, exemplifies what might be called latency. Although the lake itself is gone, its absence continues to act: toxic dust storms emanating from its dry bed produce some of the worst air pollution in the United States (Reisner, 1993). Here, absence is not nothingness but a material force. It exemplifies Bodenlosigkeit: the ungrounding of existence not only symbolically but physically, as air, soil, and infrastructure betray their reliability. In this sense, vanishing lakes disclose anxiety not only through personal grief or communal rupture but through atmospheric and infrastructural conditions that pervade entire regions. Such afterlives of disappearance align with work on negative geographies that treats voids, ruins, and limits as politically significant presences rather than mere lack (Bissell et al., 2021; Clarke, 2006). Taken together, these afterlives help specify one way disappearance returns materially: absence becomes not only perceptible but consequential across bodies, infrastructures, and the terms of environmental governance.

A parallel, more contemporary dynamic is unfolding at the Great Salt Lake, where retreating waters expose lakebed sediments that can become windborne dust. Recent research has linked such dust to potential respiratory harms and to concerns about metal and mineral constituents, sharpening public health anxieties around what the lake leaves behind when it disappears (Caldwell and Fine, 2025; Otto et al., 2025). State agencies have similarly framed the issue as an emerging air quality and health concern, explicitly tying the material afterlife of the lake to uneven exposure risks in nearby communities (Theophilus and Ulrich-Schad, 2025). Read through absence as a spatial condition, the point is not only that a lake vanishes, but that its retreat reconfigures vulnerability, responsibility, and the very terms through which ‘the lake’ remains present in everyday life. Seen this way, the afterlife of a lake's retreat is not confined to a single register, but moves through interlinked scales of experience, expertise, and infrastructural decision.

Temporalities of finitude: Sudden collapse and slow violence

The temporality of disappearance is equally significant. Some lakes undergo sudden collapse, in which a few decades of intervention produce dramatic ungroundings. The Aral Sea epitomises this temporality. Within a single generation, massive irrigation schemes converted the world's fourth-largest inland sea into a desert, leaving behind abandoned ports and stranded ships (Micklin, 2007). The suddenness of this collapse heightens the sense of exposure, exemplifying anxiety as a shock that tears away presumed stability. Sudden collapses function as ontological jolts that reorder memory and orientation in one lifetime, a feature that will matter for how geographers read finitude as lived rather than abstract.

By contrast, other lakes exemplify the temporality of slow violence (Nixon, 2011): gradual, attritional processes that unfold over decades, difficult to narrate yet corrosive in their effects. Lake Chad and Lake Urmia illustrate this temporal mode. Their gradual recession produces what might be called future foreclosure: a contraction of horizons in which residents perceive the future as narrowing, if not already closed. Anxiety here is not only an immediate rupture but a lingering condition, an anticipatory awareness of finitude. If sudden collapse dramatizes ungrounding, slow violence rehearses it day after day, embedding anxiety into everyday life. These temporalities also shape political responsibilities, since long emergencies often fall below thresholds of crisis response even as they deepen ontological exposure (Anderson, 2010; Blaser, 2014; Escobar, 2018; Grove et al., 2022).

Varieties of ontological disclosure: Unheimlichkeit, Bodenlosigkeit, future foreclosure

These cases reveal at least three distinct modalities of how vanishing lakes disclose absence. Unheimlichkeit, or uncanniness, occurs when landscapes that once oriented existence become strange: a shoreline that recedes, a village that finds itself inland, and a port stranded in a desert. Bodenlosigkeit, or groundlessness, manifests where disappearance unsettles not only symbolic meaning but the physical substrates of life, as in the toxic dust storms of Owens Lake. Future foreclosure arises when disappearance collapses temporal horizons: the recognition that continuity is not guaranteed, that possibilities are finite, and that the future harbours exhaustion rather than adaptation. Each of these modalities demonstrates that absence is not a void but a constitutive presence, a way in which the ontology of space is disclosed through loss. This reading also accommodates haunting, since what has vanished persists as trace, memory, and residue, an active presence that continues to shape worlds even in its apparent departure (Bissell et al., 2021; Derrida, 2012; Kristeva, 2024).

Future foreclosure does not simply denote the absence of prospects but the contraction of existential horizons through which communities orient themselves toward what is yet to come. As Romanillos (2008) has argued, finitude is not merely an ontological limit but a mode of being-in-the-world that shapes how possibilities appear, recede, or become foreclosed. Disappearance intensifies this condition by rendering certain futures uninhabitable or unintelligible, creating uneven geographies of exposure where some worlds retain temporal openness while others are pushed toward exhaustion. In this sense, vanishing lakes do more than unsettle ecological or political arrangements; they reorder the temporal architectures that sustain collective endurance, imagination, and capacity to project life forward.

From case to concept

The point of these examples is not simply to catalogue environmental decline but to frame them as empirical instantiations of existential disclosure. The Aral Sea dramatizes ungrounding through sudden collapse; Lake Chad illustrates collective Unheimlichkeit through slow attrition; Lake Urmia embodies temporal foreclosure, where anticipation itself becomes anxious; Owens Lake exemplifies latency, where absence persists as atmospheric presence. Each case thus represents not only an ecological crisis but a different variety of disclosure. Treating them comparatively allows a move from case to concept, in which disappearance is read as worlding in reverse: the decomposition of relations through which new, often fragile forms of dwelling must be composed (Ingold, 2021; Steinberg and Peters, 2015; Tsing, 2015).

To speak of ‘worlding in reverse’ is to recognise that disappearance is not only the loss of ecological form but the unmaking of the relations, orientations, and ontological commitments through which a world coheres. Worlding, as scholars such as Escobar (2018) and Peters and Steinberg (2019) emphasise, refers to the ongoing practices through which beings, places, and possibilities are composed. When lakes recede, these practices do not simply halt; they are displaced, strained, or forced into new configurations, producing asymmetrical forms of world-loss in which certain modes of dwelling become untenable while others are reproduced at a distance. Understanding disappearance through worlding, therefore, clarifies why vanishing lakes constitute more than environmental degradation: they transform the very conditions under which collective life becomes thinkable, liveable, and imaginable.

Taken together, vanishing lakes reveal ecological disappearance as a spatialisation of anxiety. They show that crisis is not reducible to scarcity or governance failure but must also be read as an ontological event, one in which absence paradoxically appears as presence. For human geographers, the task is to recognise these events as provocations that compel the discipline to theorise loss, withdrawal, and fragility as constitutive dimensions of space. This shift reframes justice as the uneven distribution of exposure to finitude and of capacities to sustain worlds, which links existential analysis with political ontology and with debates on governance without collapsing one into the other (de la Cadena, 2015; Latour, 2018; Whyte, 2016).

A concise illustration of ontological politics is offered by May's (2022) analysis of conflict around Lake Atitlán, where a wastewater megaproject promoted as an environmental solution was contested by Maya Tz’utujil actors as an intrusion into a living lake and as a reordering of relational obligations. What is at stake in this account is not only technical efficacy or distributive fairness, but the authority to define what the lake is, how repair should be enacted, and which forms of knowledge and attachment count in governance. This helps clarify why care and justice in vanishing lake contexts are not supplementary moral claims. They are ontopolitical practices through which worlds are defended, negotiated, and, at times, refused.

Contribution to geographical thought

The provocation advanced here is not merely that vanishing lakes should be added to the expanding catalogue of ecological crises. Rather, they compel geographers to reckon with disappearance as a constitutive dimension of spatial experience. What withdraws is not only a resource but the very grounds of dwelling, the ontological horizon in which life unfolds. From this orientation, four interrelated contributions to geographical thought can be articulated: a negative ontology of space, an extension of political ecology and hydrosocial scholarship, a bridging of ontology and affect, and a rethinking of crisis itself. These contributions are offered to open discussion in the spirit of an anchor article, inviting engagement rather than closure.

Toward a negative ontology of space

Geographers have traditionally conceptualised space through presence, often privileging what is materially or symbolically manifest while leaving the spatial force of absence underexamined. In what follows, haunting is not treated as a competing framework to a negative ontology of space, but as a complementary bridge that helps specify how absence remains efficacious through traces, attachments, and material residues. Regional geography privileged landscapes, Marxist geography foregrounded production, and relational approaches emphasised flows and connections. Even critical work that explores ruins, vacancies, or absence tends to treat loss as derivative – a remainder of presence or a marker of dysfunction. Vanishing lakes unsettle this orientation by showing that absence is not simply negation but a mode of spatial disclosure in its own right.

This stance is distinct from, yet in productive dialogue with, work on ruins, absence, and haunting. Haunting foregrounds traces, memories, and the spectral persistence of what is gone (e.g. Navaro-Yashin, 2012), while ruin studies attend to the cultural and material afterlives of decay. Recent work on negative geographies further examines how limits, voids, and erasures act as generative spatial forces rather than simple lacks (Bissell et al., 2021; Clarke, 2006; Landau-Donnelly and Pohl, 2023; Pohl, 2024). By contrast, a negative ontology of space grants absence explicit ontological status and couples it with an operational comparative frame. Rather than treating disappearance as a metaphor or mnemonic, it specifies how absence discloses worldhood across identifiable modes (recession, ruination, and latency), scales (intimate, collective, and infrastructural), and temporalities (sudden collapse, slow violence, and future foreclosure), each with observable indicators. The point is not to rename haunting, but to render absence legible as a constitutive spatial condition amenable to empirical differentiation.

As Derrida (2012) reminds us, haunting is not a figurative return of the past but a spectral structure of presence in which what withdraws continues to act through its traces. Disappearance thus produces conditions in which the absent lake insists, not simply as memory but as an unfinished demand that shapes how worlds are inhabited. Kristeva's (2024) reflections on abjection similarly show that what is expelled or cast out persists as affective and material residue, unsettling the boundaries through which subjects and places cohere. In this sense, vanishing lakes do not only leave atmospheric or infrastructural afterlives; they generate spectral attachments and disturbances that condition how finitude is lived, narrated, and contested.

The desertified basin of the Aral, the saline crusts of Urmia, and the dust storms of Owens Lake illustrate how disappearance generates its own material, affective, and political realities. Rather than empty spaces awaiting restoration, these landscapes show absence as a constitutive presence that reshapes livelihoods, health, and memory. Read comparatively, these cases clarify how disappearance unfolds across different modes, such as recession, ruination, and latency, while also operating at intimate, collective, and infrastructural scales and through temporalities ranging from sudden collapse to slow exhaustion. Taken together, these dynamics demonstrate that absence acts empirically in patterned ways: it redraws spatial coordinates, leaves residues and stranded infrastructure through which collapse continues to act, and produces atmospheric afterlives such as dust, salinisation, and toxicity. Framing disappearance through these observable modalities provides conceptual and comparative traction for geographical research and reinforces the central claim of this article: that absence, in its multiple and material forms, is not anomalous but a constitutive condition of contemporary socioecological worlds. These arguments align with recent work that pluralises the materialities of water by emphasising lively, more-than-water assemblages and their socioecological implications (Rusca et al., 2025).

Extending political ecology and hydrosocial scholarship

Political ecologists have long demonstrated that ecological scarcity is produced through uneven development, capitalist accumulation, and state intervention (Blaikie and Brookfield, 2015; Robbins, 2019; Swyngedouw, 2004), while hydrosocial scholars have shown how water is co-constituted through infrastructures, discourses, and governance regimes (Bakker, 2010, 2012; Jepson et al., 2017; Linton, 2010; Linton and Budds, 2014; Loftus, 2009; Yates et al., 2017; Zeitoun and Warner, 2006). Both literatures have decisively unsettled apolitical accounts of scarcity. Rather than reiterating these foundational insights or framing disappearance solely as a managerial failure of allocation and control, extending this work requires addressing the ontological stakes that vanishing lay bare. When lakes recede, what is unmade is not only access to water but the very conditions of existence, exposing whose worlds become precarious or foreclosed. Recasting political ecology through this lens sharpens its critical force: power concerns not only the production of scarcity but the uneven exposure to finitude that disappearance materialises, connecting political ecology with political ecology's emphasis on the endurance or erasure of worlds (Blaser, 2014; Burman, 2017; de la Cadena, 2015; Escobar, 2018). This resonates with emerging contributions that explore how ontological inclusion and exclusion shape participatory water governance across different worlds (Drouin et al., 2025; Rickard et al., 2024; Rickard and Ludwig, 2025; Sabinot et al., 2025).

From this angle, power must be reconceptualised. It is not only about who has access to water but about whose conditions of existence are unmade when environments withdraw. Political ecology's focus on inequality is sharpened when coupled with ontological disclosure: the uneven production of scarcity is also the uneven exposure to finitude. In this register, justice does not collapse into care; justice concerns how exposure to finitude is distributed, while care names situated practices of response. This generates new lines of inquiry through which geographers can ask whose futures are foreclosed first under particular irrigation regimes and through which infrastructures, as well as how toxic afterlives such as dust, salinisation, and infrastructural decay distribute Bodenlosigkeit unevenly across bodies and communities, in what ways state and corporate strategies of resilience or adaptation become sites of anxiety that expose the limits of mastery, and how Indigenous or alternative ontologies of water might reframe absence as a transformation in relations with beings rather than a mere deficit in supply. Relatedly, debates on decolonising territory show that these dynamics also hinge on territorial projects, understood not only as spatial strategies but as epistemic struggles over which worlds are rendered governable and which are made expendable (Halvorsen, 2019). Such questions preserve the critical edge of political ecology while situating it within a broader horizon of existential fragility.

Linking ontology, affect, and political imagination

Vanishing lakes also provide a hinge between literatures often held apart: affective geographies, ecological grief, and political ontology. Emotional geographies have highlighted how attachments to place are mediated by feeling (Anderson and Smith, 2001). Studies of ecological grief and solastalgia describe the psychic and embodied consequences of environmental loss (Albrecht, 2011; Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018). Political ontology has disrupted the assumption of a singular modern ontology, emphasising the multiplicity of worlds and relational beings (Blaser, 2014; de la Cadena, 2015).

What vanishing lakes add is the recognition that absence itself is disclosure. The cracked shoreline does not only trigger grief; it reveals the fragility of worldhood. Dust storms are not only pollutants but atmospheric manifestations of withdrawal. In such events, affect and ontology converge: anxiety, grief, and estrangement are not epiphenomena but modes through which finitude becomes manifest. These affective encounters do not end at the level of feeling; they open onto practices of responsibility and maintenance, providing the very conditions through which care becomes imaginable as a response to disappearance.

Care, in this sense, is not only an affective response but an ontological orientation that links disclosure to obligation. While Heidegger's Sorge names the structure of being-in-the-world, feminist and STS care scholarship shows how care materialises as a situated, world-maintaining practice that binds bodies, infrastructures, and ecologies. To read vanishing lakes through care is therefore to link disclosure to obligation: disappearance does not simply reveal finitude; it calls forth specific labours of maintenance, repair, and response in fragile worlds (de La Bellacasa, 2017; Tronto, 2020). This alignment situates ‘care’ as the hinge between affect and ontology – neither reducible to emotion nor to norm, but a practical mode through which threatened lifeworlds are sustained or fail to be sustained. Because care surfaces precisely where disappearance discloses the fragility of shared worlds, it also generates claims on how responsibilities are allocated, preparing the ground for the political questions that follow.

Indigenous and decolonial water ontologies have long articulated water as relation, obligation, and being, grounding political struggles in the endurance or erasure of worlds (Blaser, 2014; Boelens et al., 2023, 2024; de la Cadena, 2015; Todd, 2016; Whyte, 2016). These approaches do not sit as alternative expressions of a Heideggerian analytic but as parallel and, in many contexts, prior ways of understanding how worlds are composed and unmade through ecological change. Rather than positioning Heidegger as the primary frame, placing his account of care and finitude alongside these ontologies makes it possible to clarify what disappears when lakes recede: not only resources or infrastructures but relations, temporal horizons, and obligations that sustain more-than-human worlds. In this arrangement, translation is not from Indigenous perspectives into Heidegger, but a two-way movement in which each tradition illuminates different dimensions of disappearance and world-loss. This resonates with work on pluriversal contact zones and ‘excess’, which conceptualises frictions not as noise but as constitutive to how worlds meet and how repair becomes contested (De la Cadena and Escobar, 2023). Such an approach prevents ontological reduction while enabling a comparative vocabulary for articulating how exposure to finitude is distributed unevenly across communities, lands, and modes of existence (Burman, 2017; Escobar, 2018). Contemporary analyses further demonstrate how Indigenous and more-than-human water ontologies actively shape climate vulnerability, relational ethics, and governance futures in diverse regions (Ebhuoma, 2024; Jacob et al., 2024; Linton and Pahl-Wostl, 2024).

Expanding the imagination of crisis

Finally, vanishing lakes compel geographers to rethink what crisis itself means. Crisis is often imagined as a breakdown of systems, an equilibrium disrupted. For Heidegger, however, crisis is also an event of disclosure: the recognition that permanence is an illusion and dwelling is always precarious.

Placing this argument in dialogue with decolonial and Indigenous thought clarifies what kinds of worlds are unmade when waters withdraw. Indigenous water ontologies have long asserted that water is a relation and a being, not merely a resource; withdrawal therefore reconfigures obligations, kin relations, and temporal horizons rather than only access (Blaser, 2013; de la Cadena, 2015; Todd, 2016). This also reframes crisis as a question of time: colonial and extractive projects reorder temporalities such that futures are differentially foreclosed, a point sharpened by Indigenous climate scholarship (Whyte, 2016) and by critiques of the Anthropocene's racialised geologies (Johnson et al., 2014; Povinelli, 2016). Read together, these interventions underscore that ontological disclosure is never neutral: who bears the ungrounding of disappearance, under which historical arrangements, and with what exposures to finitude, is unevenly distributed.

This reframing unsettles resilience discourse. To cast vanishing lakes as opportunities for adaptation risks occluding their deeper provocation, that the future itself can contract, that horizons can foreclose, that exhaustion is a temporal possibility. A politics attuned to disclosure must therefore ask what forms of maintenance, repair, and accompaniment are owed to threatened worlds: here, care names the practical hinge between disclosure and obligation (de La Bellacasa, 2017; Tronto, 2020), without collapsing Indigenous and decolonial perspectives into a Heideggerian frame.

The implications are significant. It becomes possible to ask, not as technical puzzles but as geographical provocations, how absence orients human life; how finitude shapes place and temporality; and what it means to inhabit landscapes where disappearance, rather than growth, is the dominant mode of change. The comparative analytic developed in this article (across modes, scales, and temporalities) operationalises this shift, and the next section brings these threads together. This suggests a research agenda focused on evidentiary thresholds for absence, comparative strategies for tracing exposure to finitude, and the practical ethics of care under conditions of withdrawal.

A short agenda for dialogue

Taken together, these contributions reposition vanishing lakes as more than ecological case studies. They are philosophical events that unsettle geography's conceptual foundations. Space needs to be understood through absence as much as presence; crisis should be grasped as ontological disclosure rather than only managerial failure; and power requires analysis not only as governance or inequality but as the capacity to shape the very conditions of existence. By advancing these propositions, the aim is not to dissolve geographers into philosophy but to demonstrate that philosophical reflection is indispensable to geographical thought. Vanishing lakes are thus not only environmental tragedies but theoretical provocations. They compel geographers to reckon with fragility, temporality, and absence as constitutive of dwelling in a finite world.

Conclusion

The vanishing of lakes unsettles more than hydrological regimes, livelihoods, or governance arrangements. It discloses the fragility of dwelling itself, revealing that the permanence of place is illusory and that human existence is fundamentally finite. In this sense, ecological disappearance must be approached not only as a political or environmental problem but as an ontological event. Crises of water are thus crises of disclosure: moments when the grounds of existence themselves become precarious and exposed.

For geographers, this recognition calls for a negative ontology of space, an orientation that treats absence, loss, and withdrawal as constitutive dimensions of spatial experience rather than anomalies or failures. Such a perspective unsettles the discipline's prevailing emphasis on flows, productions, and presences, encouraging us as scholars and practitioners to reckon with rupture and disappearance as fundamental modes of transformation. It extends, rather than replaces, political ecology and hydrosocial scholarship by situating their insights within the broader horizon of finitude.

The challenge, then, is not to overcome or resolve the anxiety revealed by vanishing lakes but to remain with it; thinking with unease as a condition of insight. Doing so requires confronting questions that cannot be settled within any single epistemological frame. What does it mean to dwell in landscapes defined as much by absence as by presence? How might geographers account for the ontological dimensions of ecological crisis without collapsing them into managerial logics? How could acknowledging finitude alter the theoretical and political horizons of the field? And how might these arguments shift when read through other epistemological traditions: feminist, decolonial, or Indigenous cosmologies that have long grappled with vulnerability and relationality in their own registers? This is why questions of evidence and repair cannot be treated as technical add-ons, because they are the very means through which worlds are granted or denied continuity.

Addressing these questions requires specifying what should count as evidence for disappearance across different contexts, from remotely sensed shoreline recession and long-term lake storage estimates to changing salinity regimes, dust emission thresholds, and the ruination of infrastructures that once anchored hydrosocial worlds (AghaKouchak et al., 2015; Pekel et al., 2016; Reisner, 1993; Yao et al., 2023). This line of inquiry can also illuminate the ethical stakes of care and justice, asking how practices of maintenance, repair, and accompaniment are distributed across uneven exposures to finitude (de la Cadena, 2015; Tronto, 2020), or reposition this analytic within Indigenous and decolonial frameworks where water, relation, and vulnerability have long been co-theorised through other vocabularies (Blaser, 2014; de la Cadena, 2015; Escobar, 2018; Todd, 2016; Whyte, 2016). It further resonates with recent work on ontological inclusion and exclusion in participatory water governance (Rickard et al., 2024; Rickard and Ludwig, 2025), underscoring that what counts as evidence is inseparable from what modes of existence are recognised or marginalised. From this perspective, justice concerns not simply the distribution of water but the differential capacity to inhabit a world whose very grounds are becoming unstable. Still, the argument has immediate implications for how geographers frame justice under conditions of withdrawal.

If disappearance is approached only through allocation, adaptation, and governance performance, geographers risk reproducing a narrow evidentiary politics in which what counts is what can be measured, priced, or modelled, while world loss is relegated to ‘social impact’. An ontological justice lens shifts attention to evidentiary thresholds and translation devices that make some losses speakable and others silent, and to the uneven distribution of temporal openness, including future foreclosure. This does not replace distributive claims but thickens them by asking what kinds of worlds distributive solutions presuppose, and which worlds they leave without recognisable grounds for repair. Ontological justice thickens distributive claims by asking what kinds of worlds distributive remedies presuppose, and which forms of world loss cannot be translated into repair through allocation alone. Ontological justice thickens distributive claims by asking what kinds of worlds distributive remedies presuppose, and which forms of world loss cannot be translated into repair through allocation alone. It extends recognition beyond identities and communities to the relations and obligations that policy formats render non-evidentiary, and therefore non-claimable as justice. First, justice requires attending to evidentiary infrastructures that make some losses governable and others dismissible. Second, it requires recognising ontological exclusion as a harm in itself, when relations and obligations to watery worlds are translated into ‘impacts’ or ‘resources’ (Blaser, 2014; de la Cadena, 2015). Third, it reframes responsibility as the uneven capacity to sustain world continuity under withdrawal, not only the fair allocation of a shrinking resource (Tronto, 2020; Whyte, 2016).

These are not questions this article can and should answer definitively. They are provocations meant to open a continuing dialogue on how geographers might engage disappearance not simply as failure but as disclosure of what it means to inhabit a finite world. In the spirit of Dialogues in Human Geography, this article is offered as a starting point, open to comment, critique, and re-interpretation from multiple epistemological and political horizons that can enrich, challenge, and transform its claims. Ultimately, the provocation is conceptual rather than empirical: vanishing lakes compel geography to rethink how worlds are disclosed through absence, and how finitude conditions the horizons of both analysis and responsibility.

What vanishing lakes ultimately disclose is that crisis, in this register, is not a disruption of systems but a disclosure of being-in-the-world. The cracked shoreline and exposed salt flats are ecological indicators, but more fundamentally, they are events in which the very ground of existence becomes ungrounded. Yet this analysis can no longer remain purely phenomenological. To understand finitude today, it must be situated within multiple ontologies and material inequalities. Fragility becomes legible as finitude precisely when disappearance reveals the limits that structure how certain worlds endure while others are left without a temporal ground on which to stand. The sense of loss that accompanies ecological collapse is inseparable from histories of extraction and colonisation that determine who bears the cost of disappearance. Questions of finitude cannot be detached from the political conditions that render some lives, lands, and futures more disposable than others. Such anxiety is not simply a reaction to loss; it is the experiential register through which the fragility of dwelling becomes perceptible as an ontological condition rather than an emotional state.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Özge Can Doğmuş

Ethical approval

Not applicable. This essay relies solely on published secondary sources and involves no human participants.

Author contributions

Single-author article; the author is solely responsible for all aspects of the work.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data availability statement

No new data were created or analysed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable.

Notes

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