Fire, Flood, Famine, War — The End Times Are Here
I’m reading Bill McKibben’s latest eco-horror story, Falter. It is non-fiction, of course, and it occurs to me: The End-Timers are right, The End Is Near. Fire, flood, drought, pestilence, famine, disease, war, and storms, huge storms. Global climate change is bringing them all to us.
Fire — See the town of Paradise, in my state, California. No, you cannot see it, it burned down in 2018. 83 lives were lost.
Storms — Hurricanes Irma and Maria wiped out Puerto Rico in 2017.
Flood—New Orleans 2005, Houston and Bangladesh this year
Drought — California (my state) 2012–2018, conintuous drought
Insect infestations—“The U.S. Forest Service reports that bark beetles had killed more than 102 million trees in the Sierra Nevada by the end of 2016.” ref
Famine—”[I]n Chad … nearly half the population is now chronically malnourished.” ref
Disease and pestilence—Ebola in the Congo in 2014 and again now
War—Darfur in 2007, Syria now
Even earthquakes: The one natural disaster I didn’t think we could blame on climate change, well, we can. It turns out so much weight is being lifted off the earth by melting ice that the land actually rises, causing geologic faults to release their bound up energies in temblors. Not to mention the earthquake swarms caused by fracking for oil and natural gas, the primary causes of global climate change.
These are just a few examples. There will be increasing numbers of such disasters in the coming decades … until global civilization collapses.
Leave the carbon in the ground. Shut down the fossil fuels companies stat. Listen to our children. Listen to Greta Thunberg. Give the world a Green New Deal.
Unfortunately, the End-Timers are wrong about the Rapture. There will be no Rapture. We are all Left Behind to deal with it. To die with with it. Unless you want to think of the super-wealthy fleeing in their private jets to their private compounds in New Zealand as a Rapture of sorts.
And afterwards? After global civilization collapses, and most of humanity dies, those few who survive return to hunter-gatherer societies—back to the Garden of Eden, if you are lucky enough to survive in a locality that has flora and fauna that can be hunted and gathered for food.
Then what? Do we pursue agriculture again and start the cycle over? Or will we be wise enough to keep hunting and gathering in the garden? If we restart the cycle, will we have learned our lesson and avoid the trap of capitalist greed and selfishness this time around? How many cycles will it take? Or will human nature prevent us from ever reaching the stars and becoming a galactic civilzation?
Maybe in the next cycle, it will be nuclear weapons that get us. That could end the cycle once and for all. End homo sapiens once and for all. Hey, there’s still a pretty good chance of doing that this time around. War is here, and more war is coming. The Doomsday Clock is at 2 minutes to midnight.
Obligatory Optomistic Ending: Folks, Jesus is not returning. But there is still a chance for us to be our own savior. Leave the carbon in the ground. Shut down the fossil fuels companies stat. Listen to our children. Listen to Greta Thunberg. Give the world a Green New Deal. But we must act quickly and decisively if we are to save our civilization.
