The End of Our World

This article spells out exactly what I have been strongly feeling these last few years, especially with all the recent mad weather around the world and the accumulated news of such things as the melting of the Arctic icecap, the Antarctic icecap, the permafrost in the Arctic, and of glaciers all around the world; the sudden failure of millions of seabirds in the North Sea to lay eggs, of sardines to arrive at their spawning grounds in the Pacific, of the mass plague of wood bore beetles in the Arctic, destroying entire regions of forests; the record snows falling just here in Japan, the monster storms hitting the coasts everywhere, the huge mudslides in rainy climes, enormous flooding, deserts expanding, rain forests falling, islands disappearing under the waves…

You see all this… if you take the time to gather it together in your arms… and you wonder, “What exactly is wrong with us?” It’s like we’re mesmerized by the lights of Vegas, unable to pull away from the slot machine, even though we’re about to find ourselves destitute. Does it take the vast hand-swipe of God to bring us to our senses? The awful part of it is that we seem to deny the reality of the natural world like some peevish teenager; it still never occurs to us that we are not the center of the universe, that the world will erase us as casually as we step on cockroaches or spray mosquitoes. Our absence will be missed by no one and nothing. Only we make so much of ourselves that we would risk our own existence and the stability of the planet to hawk our wares. The utter callousness and stupidity…

I have written about this often enough to know that a great many people will pooh-pooh me for being too alarmist and pessimistic. But I think it is that so few people want to open their eyes and see just how bad things really are. Or, if they do, they will vigorously shake their heads, clap their hands over their ears, and shout, “No! No! No! No! No! No! No!“. They say, “Miguel, why do you have to be so depressing all the time? Life is hard enough without worrying about things we can’t do anything about.” We have the symptoms of terminal cancer, but by God, we’re going to defeat that notion out of sheer optimism and to hell with the doctor!

I have diabetes. It is incurable. I will most likely die from complications that it causes. And I know what it is to deny an awful truth in yourself. People who love me tell me, “You have to be more positive about the disease, Miguel. Fight it!” Of course I fight it. What else can I do? And yet the kernel of truth resides within me and there is no denying it. It is a hard, impersonal truth, with no feeling this way or that whether I live or die. God, nor any other god, is not going to step in and save me.

I think that’s what the world’s populace is waiting for, some deus ex machina to come floating down from the clouds to grant us absolution and sprinkle fairy dust over the land, curing all wrongs. But volcanoes and earthquakes and floods and hurricanes and tsunamis act like the gods… supremely indifferent to our existence. And like the gods, when the mortals deem to insult them, the retribution is terrible. The Elders of our tribe long ago understood this intrinsically. We make fun of them today, calling them ignorant and backward.

Perhaps it’s, as Lovelock pronounces, too late. If so, our entire civilization is about to end. Can we even grasp that? And if the reality hits home, what can we do about it? Or more importantly, what can we do about ourselves? Is there dignity in extinction?