ABSTRACT
During the 1960s and 1970s, the rapid development of Earth Sciences in the United States revived the catastrophist framework developed during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to explain patterns in the geological and fossil record. Catastrophism posited that episodic cataclysms shaped the history of the Earth, mainly catastrophes mentioned in the Bible such as the Universal Deluge and the Apocalypse, opposite to the modern view of gradualism. This paradigm stipulates that long-term incremental processes shape our environment. Neocatastrophism is a revival of catastrophism that posits that catastrophic events have punctuated the gradual, incremental changes in Earth’s history. The consolidation of the Earth Sciences occurred during the Cold War when a nuclear fallout could lead to human extinction. The revival of catastrophism, neocatastrophism, brought to the fore its apocalypticist roots and permeated the way scientists convey the urgency of climate change as a punctual catastrophe in time that can be averted. Nevertheless, the apocalypticist discourses predominant in the Global North are shaping the way we approach the environmental crisis humanity faces while alienating the adaptation and mitigation urgencies in the Global South.
