It's the end of the world (as we know it)

In the midst of such rapid change it is easy to feel that the ground is being taken from under us, forcing us to frantically seek out a mythology that can sustain us - sustainability, of course, being a catchword of the times. Says Ventura:

The word Panic comes from the great God Pan, the Disruptive One, the divine energy gone mad, the Pan who suddenly appears screaming and everybody goes crazy and runs away. That’s the “ic” of Pan-ic. And it’s not just that the civilization is dying. Nature as we know it seems to be dying too because the civilization is dying, which is an extraordinary thing … When Rome fell, nature didn’t give a damn …

To mistake these changes for the end of the story, and the end of nature, as Ventura and Hillman ultimately conclude, is “insane”. “Poo-tee-weet”, whistled the birds after the bombing of Dresden in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. So it goes.

It is interesting that as other physical sciences discover greater uncertainty and chaos, climate science is making claims to certainty, which doesn’t exist even in current measurements, let alone in imagined future scenarios. History suggests we should be wary of such certitude. In fact, if uncertainty is the only certainty, and change unchangeable, there is a case that these are the very rocks on which a sustainable alternative mythology could be built, which essentially translates to preparedness, adaptability and mitigation as our wisest paths. In mythology, creativity is born of chaos. And, after all, Chaos as a God is not that different from the Christian God. They both move in mysterious ways.

As I pause in writing this, my laptop screensaver comes to life. Suddenly, I am looking at our blue planet from above, floating gently across my screen. It dissolves into a close up of Jupiter, with one of its 63 moons silently disappearing into the shadowy half of its orbit. And now I am looking into deep space and words fail me. Incomprehensible distances, black holes, supernovas, unimaginable forces, unknown wonders. I feel less than miniscule. Yet, knowing my Desiderata (I have a version read by Leonard Nimoy), I understand that I am part of it.

The Apocalypse in the Bible is, of course, also the time of Revelation. I make no claims to revelatory truth, but I do wonder if the greatest revelation doesn’t become clearest in the moment of our own demise: that we are stardust and unto stardust we shall return. In the meantime, to quote the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, “Don’t panic”, and carry a good towel.