Notes from the End of the World
The Spring of Our Discontent
Last night Diane and I attended "The Sixth Extinction," a lecture by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert about the impending apocalypse that may or may not include homo sapiens. It was a cheery night. To set the stage, it came at the end of a day in which it had rained on and off for hours—this after a month of ongoing rain and snow that has long ago worn out its welcome in Southeast Ohio. About mid-afternoon the alarm on my cell phone let me know that the national weather service had issued a flash flood warning for our area. From our dining room window, I watched sheets of precipitation cleanse the steep hillside across the street of the seed and straw that city workers had blown onto it only a day earlier. Workers were attempting to stem the ongoing erosion that a month earlier had collapsed a chain link fence while pushing not an inconsiderable mound of mud and stone into the middle of Fort Street. This, coming on the five-year anniversary of the 200-ton boulder that fell from said hill onto our house, was not a welcome sight.
At the same time, the hill behind our house has begun to slide. The maple tree at the edge of our backyard that we have been admiring as it grows to maturity is now about eight feet lower than it used to be. Where there was a slope, now there is a cliff. Diane and I spend a good portion of last weekend planting little hardwood saplings amongst the grape vines, forsythia, and other thorny brambles that continue to cling for dear life. Thank god for them! If not for them, it would be us at the bottom of the hill.
So things are going well. I had stopped downtown at Little Professor to pick up a copy of Ms. Kolbert's book before the lecture. As I sat in OU's Memorial Auditorium waiting for the hall to fill and my wife to join me, I read about the extinction of frogs around the world, caused by a common fungus that had unwittingly been transported around the world by, you guessed it, homo sapiens. As I read, drum beats of rain intermittently pounded on the roof far above me, so much so that I occasionally paused to look up and ponder what the what was going on out there. Diane arrived soon enough to inform me that pea-sized hail had pelted her as she fled from the street corner to the hall entrance. She had run about fifty yards with an umbrella. Her pants were soaked from her shins to her shoes.
Onto the lecture, Ms. Kolbert informed her audience that homo sapiens are contributing to the mass extinction of numerous of our fellow Earthlings in three main ways—by emitting greenhouse gases that are raising global air temperatures; by increasing the acidity of the world's oceans as a result of that same excessive CO2, thereby precipitating the collapse of coral reefs, so critical to oceanic biodiversity; and of course, by transporting invasive species, intentionally or unintentionally, to places where they should not be, thereby upsetting the proverbial biodiversity apple cart. It was not a pretty picture, nor one that suggested ready remedies. Judging from ice core samples taken from the world's oldest ice in Antarctica, we're soon to have more CO2 in the atmosphere than the Earth has experienced in millions of years. That's MILLIONS (with an S)! We've essentially turned the atmospheric clock backwards, taking all the CO2 that it took the Earth millions of years to put into the ground, and releasing it back into the air in just a few centuries. Good news!
Ms. Kolbert admitted from the outset that she had no remedies to offer. She was merely functioning as canary, informing us that we'd better do something dramatic soon, or else. She did admit that it wasn't happening because people didn't care. There are loads of people who care. She offered as evidence the story of scientists in Hawaii that have apparently resorted to giving certain bird species hand-jobs in an effort to get them to reproduce via artificial insemination. Hmm? I wondered if there were OU students in the audience considering such a major.
After the lecture, Diane and I sought solace in beer and pizza as we contemplated the end of the world. It was not our finest hour. Both of us are lactose intolerant. But hey, in the face of such calamity, the usual rules must be suspended. I awoke a little after 3 A.M., bloated, dehydrated, and wondering how to feel. It occurred to me that I was glad that my children do not yet have children of their own. "That's a horrible thing to ... think," I said to myself while I waited for the coffee. I could imagine my sisters scolding me. But even now, I can't help admitting that there's some truth in it. We're headed for a global Easter Islandesque collapse and, rather than mobilizing all of our brightest minds and best resources toward addressing it, we're distracting ourselves with ... Tweets. Really?
As a historian, I'm reminded of earlier generations of Americans who predicted the end of the world. Somewhere in my memory, I can see an earnest man with a sandwich board on New York's Fifth Avenue warning of the world's impending demise. Over the generations, there have been no shortage of cultists and utopians trying to separate themselves from the slipstream in order to prepare themselves for the big day. But this doesn't feel like that? These are not mentally unbalanced, deranged harbingers of doom shouting from street corners. These are scientists, independently in branch after branch, in universities and scientific institutes around the world, reaching data-driven conclusions in peer reviewed journals that are worrisome at best, and to be closer to the truth, down right terrifying.
The end of the world is upon us. Can I really be writing that? In a blog? And I'm not kidding? Really? And I'm completely sober, if still a little bloated from the pizza. Stay tuned.