The End is Nigh
We’re in one of those periodic times when everything feels bad. Extreme heat, war in Europe, political upheaval in Israel, creeping authoritarianism in America, and Jason Aldean scoring a hit with a song praising small town violence. On the other hand, Barbie!
All of the bad news feels bound together somehow, like one of those rubber band balls, like any one bad thing feels inextricably tied to every other bad thing. What is it? Is that one thing the climate?
The other day I read an article about a group of scientists zeroing in a lake in Canada as the place to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch, when human activity changed the planet so profoundly that it required a new geological designation. Crawford Lake, in Milton, Ontario, “was chosen over 11 other sites because the annual effects of human activity on the earth's soil, atmosphere and biology are so clearly preserved in its layers of sediment.”
There, scientists may eventually place a commemorative marker with a more precise date for the beginning of the Anthropocene, which they will obtain by measuring plutonium levels at the bottom of the lake. Generally, measuring plutonium levels in any natural environment doesn’t herald good news.
How is one supposed to keep a sense of well-being in times like these? Is it possible? More acutely, is it even desirable? Is it ok to acknowledge that things are bad, getting worse, and unlikely to get better? How slim is the margin between pessimism and realism, between realism and resignation? At what point is it ok to throw about your hands, admit we’re fucked, and start developing a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit?
Because I feel like I might be at that point.
There’s a great scene in an overlooked movie called Beatriz at Dinner, in which a massage therapist, played by Salma Hayek, confronts a boorish land developer, played by John Lithgow, about the danger he’s doing to the planet. “Try healing something,” she says. “You can break something in two minutes, but it can take forever to fix it. That’s why we have to be careful on this Earth.”
Later, Lithgow’s character comes back at her with the argument that we’re already so screwed that it doesn’t matter what we do. Instead of wringing our hands, we’re better off behaving like him, swirling port in snifters and watching it burn. A substantial part of me is moving towards his point of view.
That’s not to say that I think anybody should live their life with doom and gloom. I’ve got two kids in their early 20’s. I want nothing more for them than to live happy and productive lives, lives of optimism. I hope they have children of their own. But how does anybody hold these two contradictory thoughts in their head – on one hand, the future is bleak; on the other, the future is bright? I don’t trust their generation to get any further in fixing things than every other generation that’s come before.
I don’t believe in magic technologies. Unfurling a “giant space umbrella” doesn’t seem like a practical solution. Neither does spraying sulfur dioxide twelve miles in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back to space. When you’ve reached the “let’s poison the atmosphere to save the planet” stage of environmental degradation, you’ve probably gone a wee bit too far.
The future will come. There will still be birthday parties and people will still fall in love. Amazing and wonderful things will still happen every single day. Wars will end. But it’s hard to believe that things won’t also continue, inevitably, sliding towards dissolution. Maybe we can arrest the slide. Maybe, in time, we can reverse it. I hope so. I’m not ready to give up altogether, but lately it’s been harder to keep on keeping on.
If the geologists are right, it only took us eighty years - less than two minutes in geological time - to break our planet. How much longer will it take to set it right?What does that look like? And what comes after?
One nice thing about living here: the sun continues to rise and set. It’s been doing it for a long time and will continue regardless of what we do. Moods are kind of like that. Today I feel one way, tomorrow another. The evidence all suggests we’re closer to sunset than sunrise, but hey, shit happens. Good and bad. Even Al Gore, who recently said that “every night on the television news is like a nature hike through the book of Revelation,” has found reasons for optimism. The inconvenient truth is upon us, but he seems to think we can turn this thing around. He know a lot more about this stuff than I do, so maybe I should slide my resignation back over an inch or so back towards good, old-fashioned pessimism, and then, eventually, towards hopefulness. Wouldn’t that be great? The world may be on fire but I’m not yet ready to start smoking.
I have to fight against my own fatalism about the present and future everyday. Most of it comes from seeing politicians take any stance, no matter if they actually believe it or not, that allows them to hang on to or increase their own amount of power and influence. And they all want more power.
When asked about why he doesn’t try to advocate for more environmental regulation even though he now admits to believing in human-caused climate, Mitch McConnell said this: “The American people are clear about their priorities. Environmental regulation is a 3% issue.” Taking any meaningful action towards reducing climate change would put his power in jeopardy and he can’t have that.
His constituency remains willfully ignorant of the ubiquitous and readily apparent evidence of climate change. If they were to accept it, their beliefs and world view would have to change dramatically and that’s not acceptable. They’re comfortable in fearing what they can easily attack: the lives of people they’ve chosen to hate.
Yeah, for me the apathy is really starting to take hold lately.