The coming apocalypse

There's a box of Twinkies in that grocery store. Not just any box of Twinkies, the last box of Twinkies that anyone will enjoy in the whole universe. Believe it or not, Twinkies have an expiration date. Some day very soon, Life's little Twinkie gauge is gonna go... empty. -  Zombieland Screenplay by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick

Lately I’ve been watching movies and reading books about utopias, dystopias and apocalypses in various forms. Sometimes it’s invaders from outer space, sometimes it’s a natural disaster, an evil mastermind or robots gone out of control. The trajectory is usually the same in these films, as one would expect from Hollywood. The hero (often some kind of scientist) tries to warn everyone of the danger. The powers that be ignore him (or less often, her). The hero’s friends and family think he might have gone a little bit loco. Before long though, the danger becomes imminent and people start to panic (cue car stunts, special effects, extras screaming and running for their lives). There is much discussion of what to do. Nobody ever listens to the scientist of course. The voices of the military industrial complex usually prevail. Financial, political and soldierly imperatives dominate for a time. However, as the story unfolds, naturally the good guys always win, true love finds a way and the world is saved once more through the heroic actions of a few ingenious individuals, often with the help of some miraculous technological breakthrough.

But this is real life, not a movie, even though some parallels with our current predicament are apparent. Although there are increasing numbers of individuals who are very alarmed and very active about the threats we face, as a species we have not fully emotionally or psychologically grasped the gravity of our situation. Just like in the movies, a growing number of brave and determined individuals have been crying out for some time trying to warn us that the earth is in danger, the problem is urgent, action is imperative. Again, not unlike the movies, we have largely ignored them. Financial, political and military voices tend to still speak the loudest. The scientists are being sidelined. The people are still largely a disempowered mass lacking leadership and purpose on the most imperative issues.

You can learn a lot from watching a zombie movie. A common theme is the quest of the survivors for food, water and zombie-proof shelter. All around are consumer goods of all kinds for the taking. Money blows down the street, but it’s all completely worthless now. The not-so-subtle point being that we have got everything backwards. The climate, the water, the earth and air that we breathe is beyond price. Although we absolutely cannot live without them, we treat them as though they were completely worthless. We use words like dirt, wasteland, swamp, weeds, vermin and pests to describe the parts of the natural world that we have not yet found a way to convert into cash. We use our rivers as drains, our oceans as rubbish tips and all the rest as a quarry.

But it is actually gold and diamonds that are worthless if you think about it. Despite a few useful applications in medicine, we could quite happily get along in a world where gold was simply left in the ground. Diamonds have a few uses in industrial processes, but nothing we couldn’t manage quite happily without. It is only their scarcity that causes us to lend these things some kind of abstract economic value. The fact that they are shiny I suppose originally led us to value them for aesthetic reasons, but everything else is just an abstraction.

The value of gold and diamonds is completely socially constructed. We can’t eat them. They don’t provide us with warmth or shelter and yet we destroy what has real value to us – clean earth, air and water – in order to extract these things. Then we jealously guard them against others and spend a lot of resources and even have started wars, keeping them in the hands of a select few individuals as well. 

If you look at it from the viewpoint of what is happening in the natural world, coal is a horror and oil is pure evil. Don’t even get me started on nuclear energy. At least we can use these things to create heat and light which is useful to our purposes I suppose. But we got along perfectly well for thousands of years without these things and we could get along perfectly well by replacing them with renewable energy sources, particularly if we managed to moderate our appetites and adjust our ideas of what makes a good life.   

Now is a critical point in our history where we must reconnect with our mother Earth and put her once more at the centre of things. If we are going to survive the coming catastrophes, it’s time to completely rethink our relationship with nature. We cannot continue to smash, kill and burn every part of the natural world that we come into contact with. We must start to care for, respect and repair the damage that we have already done to the biosphere. I am under no illusions how big this job will be or what a major paradigm shift this is going to be for homo sapiens. But if we don’t do it we will be making the biggest mistake we have ever made.