Out Come the Wolves

Obviously we do not want to believe that the apocalypse is upon us, but our current era is ticking a lot of boxes. A massive extinction event is underway globally; natural landscapes including rainforest are increasingly torn apart to make way for crop monocultures and anthropocentric land management; the climate is shifting into human-induced instability. For humans there are impending crises of overpopulation, fertile land availability, and water purity. Yet, we are trundling on.             Yes, certain concerns get thrust into the public eye, like the endangerment of charming mammals or marine plastic pollution, but the whole, the entirety, should be much more concerning than it is treated. I feel this is partly because the kind of apocalypse that our literature, art, film and religion prepares us for is dramatic, sudden, definite, universal, and possibly glamorous.      ...

Apocalyptic visions are getting harder and harder to ignore in the 21 st  century; they’re embedded densely in popular culture, the media frequently leans towards intense catastrophic fear-mongering, and many experts are espousing troubling theories about the nearing end-times, including the man who conceived of the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis, James Lovelock.             Instead of spurring a drive towards correction, this kind of embedded fear has all too often led to frantic action and bizarre offsetting of fear; Slavoj Žižek observes that in the face of impending sea level rises and the loss of both ice caps, people are instead attracted to (and fed by the media) stories about possible carbon-saving boat travel across the newly created Arctic sea, or the possiblility of Antarctica as an entirely new plain to colonise. This impedes the kind of radical environmental action massively; people are either happy to continue wit...