What is this impending doom nonsense we keep hearing about? Is it nonsense at all? What are we so afraid of, and why do we all 'see the signs'? What signs? What do you see?
Well if you were to ask me, I would have much to say. So I will pretend that you did ask me, and so I will say much.
There is an overwhelming sense of gloom that I feel from my fellow humans. I too am extremely susceptible to it, often wondering what the point is of my existence and how could anything I hope to achieve ever really matter. Especially when I think about the context that surrounds my life; the pain and suffering felt by all lifeforms of the planet, we earthlings, and all the sacrifices unheard that pave the roads of my existence, I feel a deep remorse. How can the tiny drop that is my existence hope to do much in the ocean of the things I hope to change? My realization is simple, I can never hope for the validation of seeing the wave of change occur in my own short lifetime. I know that what I want for the world is in the hands of us all, we who our alive now and our progeny, and have gained some degree of contentment in knowing that I did and said what I must towards the good I hope will come to be.
I can see the dissatisfaction in life in your eyes. As you can in mine. And together as a society it is reflected from and on one another manyfold. We do not consciously know why but our subconscious allows some clues to filter through, and the horrifying thoughts that ensue cause us to shut our minds to it. Let us open them for a long moment together.
What about a physical calamity, a geophysical cataclysm? This is an increasingly popular theory as to what will be the blade that secures our demise. For now I will discuss potential causes, and later I will talk about what 'our demise' even means in various contexts. Global warming, the failings of the ozone layer, earthquakes and tornadoes and tsunamis and volcanoes… whats it going to be?? What fell instrument of nature are we sharpening with our own wrongdoings that will strike us down? The analogy is a good one. We may be sharpening the weapon, but a weapon powerful enough to destroy us it already was. These forces of nature have been occurring for millennia beyond the scope of history. They may or may not be occurring more frequently, and we can only guess as to the frequency of these events historically. What archaeology and the anthropologic clues that stem from it shows us is that more of these cataclysmic civilization destroying events occurred than we had ever supposed before. So I say it is not so wrong to ascribe to a theory that this is how 'the world will end', but it is wrong to hold such a fatalistic viewpoint in a context of any novelty. Civilization AS WE KNOW IT is bound to change in an abrupt way, and if it has to be a negative way, it is my view that we would be lucky if it is due to some physical cataclysm such as the ones this fickle and fluid planet we call the earth constantly experiences. These fears have been felt billions for thousands of years. If this is your primary fear, then brace for it however you must, if you must, because it is inevitable, but one that forces change in your lifestyle may or may not actually be in store for this little lifetime of yours. The other ways in which human civilization may come to an end are much more horrifying.
A more insidious flavor of our demise is one that we directly cause on one another. A quite literal weapon unlike the one I previously described metaphorically, one that humanity has fashioned on its own in the little blip of time we like to call 'history'. I, just like you, can think of many potential suitors to our collective marriage to annihilation. Is it a rogue group of humans who use our actual weapons of mass destruction to make their statements? Or is it the majority in power that strikes itself down with such weapons? This is absolutely a scary prospect, one that has been an integral part of our mythos for the last 66 year and has overshadowed natural catastrophe. It is astonishing how many post-nuclear apocalyptic stories we have. Long after the cold war is said to have ended, we still have the same fears of mutual annihilation! It is depressing to me to think that with all of our capacity for love and for reason and for beauty and for society we can still think in terms of 'us and them', 'black and white' and systematically segregate ourselves with fictional boundaries. We talk about the framers intent with regards to the constitution. I wonder if they thought that the notion of the pursuit of happiness would turn into something so perverted as it is now: the blocking out of other people, the hoarding of wealth, competitive vindictiveness in all aspirations, the power of profit over truth, and the increasing inertia that protects this dying status quo. I think we have forgotten what happiness really is, if we ever were so lucky to even have experienced it. And so this pursuit has become a macabre march on a road of bones of all that that was beautiful in this world.
Possibly the most insidious of all our possible endings is the one that I feel is the most likely. It stems from the concept of biodiversity and our responsibilities to preserve it. I feel this last sentence even has a tinge of hypocrisy in it in presuming that humans can somehow be the shepherds of the greater natural world. Oh well. This is all an effort for us to think deeper on our own actions and purposes, so you will have to forgive my subjectivity at times. Biodiversity, the tree or circle of life, mother nature, gaea… at odds with globalization, invasive and endangered species, habitat destruction, and a million other poignant issues. Biodiversity is the overarching concept that allows us to invent silly things like ' we are the top of the food chain'. Since we are striding closer to this terrifying outlook, I feel it is easier to define biodiversity by instead talking about the lack of biodiversity, in snapshots. A monoculture of foods. Poaching of 'Exotic' creatures. The crows/grackles/whateverbirds teeming everywhere in urban areas. Sharks and whales extinct. Invasive species such as the fire ant and the bullfrog wiping away native species. Rainforests being chopped down for pineapple plantations. Animal and vegetable species whose numbers you can count on your fingers. Cows pigs sheep fish and now even horses raised en masse for the slaughter, for our greedy bellies. When I think of someone on their deathbead slowly dying of some disease, it reminds me of most of us after our childhood. We get slower, we sleep more fitfully, we wake up tired, we ache and we fight through the day.. our deathbeds have become our sleepwalking existence. Our interdependence with nature is what can make us truly alive, or without it, the living dead. If you see this as digressing, just hang in there a bit. All these things we are systematically eradicating for whatever reasons in the most anthropocentric way are our protective layers as a species. As we eliminate the species whose functions we can never hope to understand, we ourselves are becoming more susceptible to a worldwide de-evolution back to small and microscopic life. We are suffering increasingly from genetic abnormalities, microbial attacks, and cellular level transformations. We at a macroscopic level are formed of the microscopic level, and we have destroyed everything in between these two levels. Biodiversity is the scaffolding that allows us to exist in this macroscopic state, and it reaches far down into the smallest forms of microbial life. We stand upon a mountain, the base of which is formed from our microbial friends, upon which higher functioning creatures pile upon eachother until (perhaps again too anthropocentrically) we reach the humans at the top. For us to be, we need that underlying incomprehensible structure that is nature. As we systematically destroy the mountain, we get lower ourselves, we fall prey instead of to big cats and other creatures to sickness and disease and epidemics. The mountain is now a pile of rubble with a thin tower upon which humans stand, and we still attack the base of the tower.. and the result is that we will collapse.. the humanity will be culled along with the rest and give way to a rise in 'lower' life forms. Yes, life will continue, but humanity and human civilization will not be sustainable any longer if we do not radically alter our mindset as to our interdependence with the world.
Any sense of impending doom we feel likely stems from the dissatisfaction at the way we are living. Instead of trying to prophesize such things and perpetuate the cycles of 'i told you so"s' how about we think about what we can do to prevent such things from ever happening??
Life as we know it is being threatened not only by the usual forces of nature, but also by our own action and inaction at the greatest of levels. We must not be afraid to think and should not be defensive of our beliefs. We must accept our own lives and our own deaths, and of humanities place in the greater coexistence that is what really defines what the planet earth is. We must transcend the overvaluation of the self, just as we must escape the notions that categorize and delineate the continuity that we are a part of.
One is never without the other.