What vanishing worlds ask of thought

I am deeply grateful to Palermo (2026), Stratford (2026), Boelens (2026), Tornel (2026), Blaser (2026) and Byron (2026) for their generous and demanding engagements with my article. The six commentaries do not form a single line of response. They move in different directions, sometimes complementing the argument and sometimes pressing on its most vulnerable points. This, to me, is precisely the value of the forum. It does not simply extend the original article. It asks what kind of intellectual disposition is needed when we think with vanishing worlds.

Several concerns run through the commentaries. Palermo asks us to attend more carefully to water materialities and to the politics of unlearning. Stratford develops the question of disappearance through elemental exposure, ontolocational politics, and the uneven gathering of fragility. Boelens insists that absence is inseparable from hydrosocial struggle and that even the traces of erasure may themselves be erased. Tornel situates vanishing within longer histories of colonial negation, terricide, and infrastructural world-unmaking. Blaser cautions against assuming that disappearance names the same event across different worlds. Byron draws attention to the temporal and affective intensities through which disappearance is lived. These interventions do not collapse into a shared vocabulary. If anything, they remind us that disappearance resists easy conceptual settlement.

My article (see Doğmuş, 2026) argued that vanishing lakes disclose finitude and that absence deserves greater attention within geographical thought. I continue to hold this position. Yet the forum has helped me seeing more clearly that the question is not only whether absence is real, but how thought should proceed in its presence. Absence, as I understand it, has never been synonymous with nothingness. The withdrawal of a lake is not a simple subtraction from the world. Water may disappear as a lake while persisting as sediment, toxicity, dust, memory, conflict, longing, obligation or altered relation. In this sense, absence is one of the ways in which ecological and social worlds are transformed, redistributed, and made visible. If disappearance discloses finitude, it also discloses the limits of the languages through which finitude is named.

Palermo's call for unlearning is especially important here. I read it not merely as a challenge to a particular thinker or tradition, but as a challenge to the authority that concepts can acquire within academic life. If disappearance unsettles established worlds, it may also unsettle the frameworks through which those worlds are interpreted. To unlearn, then, is not simply to abandon inherited concepts. Contemporary academic thought unfolds within institutions, intellectual traditions, and disciplinary languages profoundly shaped by colonial modernity. None of us stands entirely outside these inheritances. Under such conditions, the pursuit of epistemic purity can itself become a form of conceptual certainty.

This is how I would now clarify my engagement with Heidegger. My intention was not to treat him as a foundational authority for thinking disappearance, nor to imply that European philosophical traditions offer privileged access to absence, care or finitude. If Heidegger remains useful, it is only insofar as his concepts can be interrupted, provincialised, and exposed to worlds that they cannot fully comprehend. The value of a concept lies less in its origin than in what happens when it is displaced from its original certainties. This does not remove the ethical and political burden of working with compromised inheritances. It does, however, suggest that critique rarely begins from an uncontaminated place.

Blaser's commentary extends this problem in a different direction. If disappearance does not necessarily name the same event across partially connected worlds, then our concepts need to move more cautiously. What appears as a loss in one world may be lived as a transformation, reconfiguration, or an altered relation in another. I do not take this as a reason to abandon finitude as a concern. I take it as a reason to recognise that finitude is not encountered through one ontological horizon alone. The difficulty, then, is not whether disappearance is real, but whether any single language can fully possess its meanings across worlds.

What emerges from these interventions, at least as I read them, is not conceptual relativism. It is a call for restraint. Concepts matter, but they become dangerous when they forget their own limits. A negative ontology of space remains valuable to me, but only if it resists becoming another sovereign language through which all absences are interpreted in advance. The task is not simply to think about absence differently. It is also to cultivate habits of thought that remain answerable to what exceeds their descriptions.

The commentaries also invite a more material and political reading of absence. Palermo asks where matter goes when water retreats. Stratford draws attention to elemental redistributions through which fragility becomes unevenly concentrated across places, bodies, and infrastructures. Boelens reminds us that disappearance is bound to hydrosocial territories and struggles. Tornel places vanishing within longer histories of territorial dispossession and world-unmaking. These interventions matter because they prevent absence from being mistaken for emptiness.

The original article did not understand vanishing lakes as empty spaces left behind by a withdrawn world. It approached absence as a condition through which altered relations become perceptible. What disappears does not simply cease to exist. It persists through transformed materialities, interrupted attachments, damaged ecologies, residual infrastructures, and unfinished obligations. Palermo's attention to water materialities helps sharpen this point. Water does not merely withdraw. It circulates, settles, evaporates, accumulates, contaminates, and reappears in altered forms. Absence is therefore not the opposite of presence. It is one of the ways in which presence is transformed, redistributed, and made politically consequential.

Stratford's insistence on elemental exposure and ontolocational politics is equally helpful. It shows that finitude is uneven not only across places, but also across bodies, ages, capacities, infrastructures, and temporal positions. Children, elders, farmers, fishers, mobile workers, and nonhuman lives do not encounter withdrawal from the same position or with the same capacities to endure, move, repair or remember. Fragility gathers through the specific coordinates of life. This prevents absence from becoming an abstract condition. It asks where exposure accumulates, through which material relations, and in whose bodies, homes, and futures.

This also complicates any easy separation between ontology and politics. Boelens is right to insist that disappearance is shaped by extraction, accumulation, diversion, grabbing, and unequal distributions of environmental harm. Water absence in one place may coincide with water abundance, flooding, squandering, or accumulation elsewhere. Absence and presence are often relationally produced. Yet this does not move us beyond the ontology of absence. It deepens it by showing how absence becomes historically organised and materially lived.

Boelens also reminds us that absence itself may be erased. The traces of disappearance cannot always be assumed to remain available for memory, evidence, or justice. They may be overwritten, covered, commodified, restored into invisibility or translated into managerial forms that neutralise their political force. This is why re-membering and rexistence matter. I understand them as practices that resist the conversion of absence into nothingness. This is not to weaken the necessity of resistance. It is to insist that resistance itself must remain answerable to the plurality of worlds, wounds, and relations it seeks to defend.

Tornel's discussion of terricide similarly reminds us that vanishing worlds rarely emerge suddenly. What appears to be disappearance often reflects longer histories of dispossession, colonial negation, disavowal, and infrastructural violence. Disappearance is frequently the visible threshold of relations that have been unmaking worlds for generations. This insight grounds absence historically without reducing it to history alone. It also clarifies why managerial languages of scarcity, adaptation, and reasonable politics so often fail to grasp what has already been rendered unliveable before it becomes legible as a crisis.

Taken together, these arguments reinforce a point that perhaps remained insufficiently explicit in the original article. Absence is not the disappearance of relations. It is their reconfiguration. What vanishes leaves behind material traces, political struggles, affective attachments, and ethical demands. The question is not whether we should choose between absence and materiality, or between ontology and political economy. The question is how absence becomes materially inhabited, politically contested, and unevenly distributed across worlds.

This brings me back to care. In the original article, I proposed care as an ethical orientation that complements, rather than replaces, justice. I still hold this view. Yet the forum has encouraged me to think more carefully about what care can and cannot do. Care cannot mean the authority to restore damaged worlds. Nor can it become a softer language for management, control, or redemption. If disappearance reveals finitude, care must begin from the recognition that not everything can be recovered, repaired, or secured.

I do not think that the commentators come to the same conclusion about care. Palermo's unlearning, Blaser's ontological plurality, Boelens's attention to erasure and hydrosocial struggle, Stratford's elemental exposure, Tornel's terricide and Byron's temporalities each pull in slightly different directions. Yet I find a shared hesitation running through these interventions: a reluctance to allow disappearance settling too quickly into any single explanatory language. What is at stake, then, may not simply be how we know more about vanishing worlds, but how we learn to approach them with greater attentiveness.

Byron's emphasis on temporality is important here because disappearance is not lived only as spatial loss. It is lived through anticipation, exhaustion, memory, delayed recognition, and the uneven narrowing of futures. Finitude is not simply a line between beginning and end. It is also a field of intensities moving through bodies, emotions, generations, and everyday rhythms. This helps clarifying why care must remain answerable not only to material residues, but also to the temporal and emotional forms through which disappearance is inhabited.

In this sense, care is not opposed to critique or political struggle. It names a mode of engagement that resists possession. To care is not to impose one's preferred future upon a damaged world, nor to assume authority over the meanings of disappearance. It is to recognise that worlds remain more than our concepts of them. Care begins when the desire to understand no longer becomes a desire to dominate.

This is also why I do not see carefulness and care as separate ethical orientations. Care already contains carefulness. It requires attentiveness to what exceeds our categories, patience before what remains uncertain, and responsiveness to forms of life that cannot be fully translated into our preferred vocabularies. Such care may demand resistance, mourning, defence, solidarity or refusal. Yet it approaches these practices without presuming that any single ontology, politics, or ethics can fully possess the worlds it seeks to protect.

For this reason, the most important lesson I draw from the forum is not that absence should be abandoned, but that it should be approached differently. A negative ontology of space remains valuable to me, but only if it learns restraint. Otherwise, it risks becoming another sovereign language of loss. The challenge posed by vanishing worlds is not only to refine our concepts, but to cultivate forms of thought capable of living with the limits of those concepts.

If an ethics emerges from these dialogues, it lies not in abandoning theory, but in disciplining its ambitions. Vanishing worlds require forms of thought that care without possession and forms of care that refuse mastery. The task for human geography is therefore not only to theorise disappearance, but to let disappearance transform the habits through which geographical thought proceeds. What vanishes does not leave us with nothing. It leaves us with relations, obligations, and claims that exceed our explanations. To remain answerable to those claims without seeking to master them may be one of the most important challenges that vanishing worlds pose to geographical thought today.