I’ve never had a problem with the world exploding and all of us vacating it together, but I have an issue with me being left around after everyone else has departed
IT IS DEFINITELY gaining traction, this idea that the world is going to end. I understand a degree of low-level anxiety about our lives and the future of the planet is characteristic of our species and keeps us alive, and the reason monkeys and parrots don’t fret about dwindling natural resources and the collapse of the Japanese economy is because they are monkeys and parrots, and not because they are more relaxed or smarter than we are. It’s true that parents who raised a family during the darkest months of the Cold War lay awake in the hours before dawn and fretted about whether nukes would annihilate their children. Farther back, I’m sure our grandparents felt the same way about the gathering danger of the Third Reich and the bombs Truman dropped.
The world has been ending since the day it began and it’s just the manner in which we’re all about to die that has changed. That’s all. It seems there won’t be a big bang after all, which is good, but there will be an incredibly large fire. Watching the recent bush fires belching millions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, first in California and more recently in Victoria, and thinking about rising temperatures around the planet, it’s hard for a layman to visualise a planet not under seige. Horrible tragedies of this nature unfold across the news every second of every day, on networks where it is the responsibility of no one to make sure that the reported sadness of life is offset with some of the joy.
According to CNN, we have about 10 years to arrest the depletion of resources and reverse our destructive attitude towards earth, but by then the world will be at least five degrees hotter, and this significant rise in temperatures will threaten the growth of crops in warmer climates, and the threat to food staples will spark catastrophic famine and war. Humans will roam the scorched earth looking to sink their rancid teeth into . . . the flesh of other humans. Okay, that last part might not be true, unless you believe every utterance of semi-deranged TV mogul Ted Turner. But the point remains. Politicians and industrialists are unwilling or unable to see that we are circling the drain and that it is not a good thing for our planet to be doing so.
And yet my reaction and that of a good many people I know is a "micro" reaction. Never before have I encountered so many otherwise sane people who live in first-world cities and still have jobs (lucky them), who have decided nonetheless to teach themselves how to trap and clean small woodland animals, how to filter water and how to start fires. These aren't impressionable drones who have fallen under the spell of Ted Kaczynski and the spectre of a soap-making Brad Pitt in Fight Club, but reasonable sorts who are worried that our Government just won't be able to prevent a catastrophic meltdown or help us find food afterwards, and who have decided to take matters into their own hands.
An American friend of mine was only halfjoking recently when he put it thus: “In case the dollar plummets and the price of olive oil skyrockets, I always make sure that we have two extra three-litre containers in the house. If such a catastrophe were to come to pass, our surplus will tide us over till the world rights itself – or, if s**t gets totally out of hand, will buy me and my family safe passage to Canada.”
These people have bought The SAS Survival Handbook: How to Survive in the Wild, in Any Climate, on Any Land or at Sea, and Apocalypse Chow: How to Eat Well When the Power Goes Out, not because they think it will help them, but because it's easier for them to learn how to forage for non-toxic fungi than it is to put their faith in the Government.
Knowledge like that represents a small but nourishing crumb of comfort, and it’s got to be easier to learn how to gut a squirrel than to convince a cute hoor TD that the world is ending, or to believe that he will be willing (or able) to save us.
But what seems to have captured the public imagination is the idea – far more terrifying than the coming apocalypse of flesh-burning heat and ashen landscape – that some of us might actually survive it. If the 1970s in film were characterised by thrillers that reflected the general mistrust of government ( All the President's Men, The Parallax View), it seems that now we have the spectre of everyman Will Smith wandering around some city, shirtless, looking for his son. "Will Smith is . . . The LAST MAN. EVER."
Clearly the fear is not that the world will end but that all society will end and that we will remain here thereafter, duking it out for survival. And this is the notion that continues to gain traction. We might survive, and then what? Worse – what if Will Smith is the only survivor? This hopelessness was crystalised to perfection by a book written before the wheels came off the economy, but now that the global mindset has swung towards depression, Cormac McCarthy's The Roadhas a prophetic quality. D-Day has not arrived, but the fears of the protagonists (where shall we find our food? Who will help us? Is our own species friend or enemy?) are our fears – certainly mine.
I've never had a problem with the world exploding and all of us vacating it together, but I have an issue with me dying while everyone else gets to live, or me being left around after everyone else has departed. But The Roadis miraculous because in it, the apocalypse is a comfort, a way of warding off more intimate, insidious fears about losing a loved one. So bring on the apocalypse – it might even be fun.