Samenvatting

This essay argues that developing a victimological imagination of mass extinctions and our transience is needed to put the current global climate crisis in a different perspective. Today’s climate victim culture seems to revolve more and more around an existential belief in an eternal human existence that is at odds with the possibility that everything will eventually perish (in Latin: ‘omnia cadunt’). A perspective of a meaningful victimological imagination of transience will be unfolded. Also, a geological and evolutionary biological interpretation is given to previous mass extinctions in relation to the transience of former forms of biodiversity and it is explained why this transience imagination matters.