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

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.