THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
....And I feel fine
by Charlie Angus

HighGrader Magazine November/December 2000

"Don't you believe that we're on the eve of destruction?"
- from the 1965 pop song Eve of Destruction by Barry McGuire

"The Secretary General of the U.N. has told us we have ten years to solve the problem of survival."
-Hal Lindsay, Late Great Planet Earth, 1970.

"Are we finally on the eve of destruction?"
- headline in supermarket tabloid The Sun, April 4, 2000

The end of the world came and went and I was the only one ready. Maybe it was the collective hangover from Y2K, but nobody, and I mean nobody, was preparing for the real big shutdown due on May 5, 2000. That was the day when the gravity effect from an alignment of the planets would cause the earth to wobble and the polar axis would slip out of place and turn the world on its side.
To prepare for the auspicious occasion I carefully thought out where I should be when the polar fat lady commenced singing. My choice was an outdoor café on Toronto's Yonge Street. With a cold beer in my hand and a copy of the book Apocalypse Soon: Travels in End Time America by Alex Heard, I awaited the dread moment.
The High Noon deadline came and went and nothing seemed to be happening. Then it occurred to me - if the world really did flip on its side would Yonge Street be a good place to judge the results? Hell, on Yonge Street anything goes. After sitting expectantly for another hour or so I tentatively stepped onto the pavement, realized the world was still in its orbit and resolved that next time the world ended I would chose a better location from which to judge the results.
Chalk it up to just another ho-hum day in the ongoing end of the world.

"A federal Department of Population and Environment (DPE) should be set up with the power to take whatever steps are necessary to establish reasonable population size in the United States."
- Dr. Paul Ehrlich, 1968

"One of the chief minerals of the Dead Sea is potash, which is a potent fertilizer. When the population explosion brings famine, potash will become extremely valuable for food production. It is strategic wealth of this sort that will cause the Russian bloc to invade and conquer Israel."
-Hal Lindsay, 1970

Okay, so I know you're thinking, what kind of maroon would give a second thought to the polar axis slipping sideways? Impending cataclysmic events are a dime a dozen these days - giant "planet killing" meteors worthy of Morgan Freeman and Bruce Willis, failed Y2K computer chips unleashing a rain of ballistic missiles, crazed monkeys spreading Level 4 toxins and, of course, your common and garden plethora of environmental catastrophes - flooding, fires and polar ice melting.
The problem with the end of the world is that we're so used to its imminent approach that we've grown jaded. Never mind the schlock headlines from the grocery store tabloids, apocalyptic ravings have become common stock with all sorts of journalists and scientists. It seems you can't engage in any serious talk about conservation these days without throwing in a lot of the "boiling of the seas and skies turning to blood" talk to prove your point.
To get a sense of changing state of the end of the world I found myself perusing the 25 cent bin at Cobalt's Highway Book Shop. There among the tattered copies of Mandingo and the Bobby Sherman Story, you can find all the best apocalyptic literature of the last thirty years -- Hal Lindsay's Classic Beast breaker The Late Great Planet Earth, Earthquake Generation by Jeffrey Goodman and a host of paperbacks telling you how to capitalize on the coming economic collapse of 1974, 1988 or 1994.
Here, in the land of failed prophecies, I found Dr. Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, published in 1968. Ehrlich's work is worth looking because it touched off a whole genre of apocalyptic sociology. Writing as a respected academic at Stanford University, Ehrlich spent a good part of his book doing the Nostradamus thing - positing various scenarios for the future. Needless to say, all of them were nasty and bleak.
Take this one for example: It's 1978 and a Chinese-backed Junta has taken over famine ravaged Mexico. The same year, bubonic plague kills 65% of Egypt and a killer smog in Los Angeles wipes out 90,000 people. On top of that, there's food rationing in the States, chaos in Communist controlled Asia and by 1980 a nuclear war makes two-thirds of the globe uninhabitable.
On the face of it, you could toss this one off as another loonie rave - something worthy of a website like "The Net Kooks Korner" which profiles "wacky prophecies and lone nutters on the 'net."
But far from being considered a lone nutter, Ehrlich still receives a great deal of critical acclaim - even though 30 years later there are pundits proclaiming an impending population shortage (whatever that means).
Ehrlich's central thesis, that there are too many people for too few resources, strikes the Malthusian chord hidden in a wide swath of political opinion from the far right to the "radical" greens. The Population Bomb continues to be referred to, although the failed prophecies are conveniently overlooked.
The question that should be asked about works like Erhlich's however, is: how wise is it to rely on the end of the world as a starting point for formulating social policy? For instance, it's one thing to proclaim that the earth is an overcrowded lifeboat if you're offering as a solution the suggestion that we all shift over, make room and share the resources.
It's a whole other thing to start proclaiming that the boat is going down and immediate action is required. My problem with the old lifeboat scenario is the fact that the ones who tend to eat the most, do the least work and have the most power are the ones most likely to start pontificating about who is the most expendable.
Thank God Ehrlich wasn't named lifeboat captain because he presented his readers with two inescapable options - either North Americans continued to enjoy democratic freedoms and thus slowly died from massive famines, or they enacted some fairly nasty, preventive measures.
Ehrlich never fully explained what these measures entailed but they make for chilling speculation.
After calling for the forced sterilization of people with IQ's under 90 and the limiting of births to one per household, Ehrlich went even further; "Unless the population size in the United States is reduced drastically (the country) will face massive famines by the year 2000."
Maybe it's me, but whenever someone starts talking about drastically reducing population, I get the sense that it's not the whities in Burbank or Rosedale who are the ones getting targetted for reduction.

"Since 1974, more and more experts have been voicing their concerns about our changing global weather patterns. Meteorologists find that, worldwide, the atmosphere has been growing gradually colder for the past three decades...The global temperature trend shows no indication of reversing and some experts believe the trend is even accelerating. Some feel that a new ice age is imminent."
-Jeffrey Goodman PhD, The Earthquake Generation, 1978

"The Alps will be snowless by 2020. The Arctic Ocean will be ice free by 2050."
- Bob Hunter, the Georgia Straight January 2000

Since the release of the Population Bomb the end of the world has undergone some drastic revisions. In 1973, Ehrlich's premonitions had to take a back seat to the complete extinction of industrial society thanks to the oil crisis. Once again, science and sociology gathered around the crystal ball - this time when a hundred or so auspicious scientists gathered for the Club of Rome.
The Club of Rome posited itself as the best and the brightest giving us an honest forecast for the coming twenty years. Needless to say it was a big downer. By the mid-80s we were going to be freezing in the dark. Resources were dwindling. Inflation was running rampant and social chaos was around the corner.
Thankfully we were offered a reprieve in the early 80s by the prospect of outright nuclear annihilation. Why go out with a cold whimper when we could do the big bang? Now clearly, there wasn't anything really new about the nuke threat in the 1980s. We'd been living with the Dr. Strangelove syndrome since the execution of the Rosenbergs. My high school, for instance, even boasted its own lead-coated bomb shelter (although by the late-70's it had been converted into a hidden "bombed" shelter for school pot-smokers).
Nonetheless, the 1980s saw a whole Renaissance of bomb paranoia. Maybe it was Reagan or all the talk about about SS-20s and cruise missiles, but people were edgy. The best and the brightest military minds were proclaiming the ever-growing lead of the Soviet military. Ah hell, anybody with half a brain knew that Ruskies were so efficient they could drive their armour over our NATO defenses in a matter of hours. Twenty years later, we find they were all just pulling our leg.

Setting aside threats like rogue asteroids, killer plagues or mass impotence from low semen counts let's jump right to the heart of today's biggest threat - global warming. Far be it for me to argue with the best and brightest of the day. I know, like anybody knows, that the weather is getting downright weird. And I certainly don't have a problem taking some preventative action as outlined by the Kyoto targets. Cutting back on smog emissions or hitting yuppie assault vehicles with higher taxes strikes me as perfectly reasonable.
What worries me, however, is the often wanton use of the crystal ball by otherwise credible people.
A recent article in the Guardian about global warming read more like a hit list from Jeane Dixon or Edgar Cayce. Purporting to be speaking in the rational voice of science the author made some wild and completely unverifiable claims about just what the world will look like in the next 50 years.
He provided a number of examples to back up his predictions, including the observation that the Himalayan snow caps were melting and Bangladesh was slowly disappearing into the sea. In a follow-up issue of the paper, however, a letter from a resident in India took umbrage with both pronouncements. The reader pointed out that no such changes had been noticed on either front.
In a similar vein, I have been trying to get a handle on the impending destruction of the continental ice shelf. Having read some passionate and sobering articles about the fragile state of the ice shelf, I have no reason not to believe that its about to plop into the sea plunging our weather into chaos.
In a recent newswire story, however, I read a comment from some bright brain that the continental ice shelf is now fine and the real threat from global warming is in the Arctic.
The question is, how does the average citizen track down the veracity of these claims?
The web isn't much help. You either come across a score of web sites hosted by friendly oil companies and right-wing free-market types debunking everything about global warming, or you find yourself wading through a whack of blood-boiling/sea-rising missionary-style rants.
Take for example this opening passage from a recent article in the Georgia Straight by Bob Hunter:
"That ominous background sound we all hear, like it or not, as the New Year's party horns and whistles fall silent, leaving us to face the morning of the onrushing millennium with a potential for terror and suffering enough to make our genes run cold, is a roar, muted and distant, but growing louder, a vast shuddering just over the even horizon. It is the sound of the planet's climatalogical system coming undone, an ecocacaphany comprising the splashing of the Larsen ice shelf as it breaks off, the booming of Atlantic waves that are 50 % higher than normal, the rumbling of river torrents unleashed by retreating glaciers, the crackle of more forest fires raging than ever before, the whoosh of sand dunes spreading up from Africa into southern Europe, the thud of shorelines collapsing as waters rise, the howl of super hurricanes, the gurgle of record floods happening everywhere, the cries of environmental refugees who have become more numerous than refugees from war and the groan of power lines breaking under unforeseen burdens of ice."
That's a whole 174 words spread out over a mere two sentences. Dripping through the diatribe is an almost unshakeable belief in our predestination to failure.
And for a political spin on this ranting and raving, check out journalist George Monbiot.
"The global meltdown has begun. Long predicted and long denied, the effects of climate change are arriving faster than even the gloomiest prophets expected. Climate change is perhaps the gravest calamity our species has ever encountered. Its impact dwarfs that of any war, any plague, any famine we have confronted so far. It makes genocide and ethnic cleansing look like side shows at the circus of human suffering. A car is now more dangerous than a gun; flying across the Atlantic is as unacceptable, in terms of its impact on human well-being, as child abuse."
Monbiot, far from being relegated to the "lone nutter" webpages wrote this diatribe in the respected newspaper the Guardian. In the name of saving of the earth, he completely tosses out any semblance of jurisprudence or social policy. If visiting relatives in England is on the same level of criminality as punching out your baby or if driving the kids to hockey practice is somehow on par with slaughtering Tutsis in Rwanda, then what future is there for society?
It will be argued that Monbiot, like Ehrlich, like so many others, is using tough language in order to shock a complacent society into action. But it might also be argued that in the guise of saving us, some of the so-called "best and brightest" are riding their own wave of nihilistic fantasy.
Gol'darn it, there just seems to be an element of wishful thinking in some of these rants. Call it eco-Calvinism, but I can't help thinking that some of the writers are actually looking forward to the big spanking from the Gaiaa that's coming our way.
Even more, I wonder if the fervour of apocalyptic language actually hinders action.
It could be argued that underlying the complacency of modern society is a fatalistic nihilism. If the world is as rotten and beyond repair as some of the ravers maintain, what chance is there for an average person to make change?
It's an issue that has perplexed reformers throughout history. Other than the reform of the good folks of Ninevah, I've never thought that a theology of damnation has done much to improve the moral rectitude of sinners. After all, if the world is doomed, why not drink, be merry and consume as much fossil fuel as possible?

So what's my advice for riding out the end of the world?
I like the notion of steering a middle course between the hedonists and the Apocalypse Now crowd. I'd like to hear less about the gnashing of teeth and learn more about how we've managed to tackle other overwhelming problems such as implementing the ban on ozone-depleting chemicals.
No big plans really; use the car a little less, learn to laugh a little more.
I'd like to take comfort in the fact that homo sapiens aren't as dimwitted and hopeless as some would have us believe.
The end of days aren't so bad once you get used to them.

Five Good Reasons Why You Should Be Toast By Now
Ever wonder why you're so jaded about the prospects of global annihilation? Consider this, whether you know it or not, you have already come through four major planet killing spectacles in the last two years alone.
Here we go:

January 1998 - Wormwood Scrubs the Earth
When the comet Hale Bopp began making its passage through the solar system in 1997, every doomsday cultist and hair-shirt howler wanted to claim the sign as their own. A cult in California known as Heaven's Gate, even offed themselves in an attempt to catch a ride on the comet's tail.
Those of the fundamentalist persuasion named the comet Wormwood after the great death star from the book of Revelations.
(One thing I've learned from end of the world scenarios, if you can claim to have support from Revelations, the Hopi or Nostradamus your stock goes way up.)
In late 1997 a group calling themselves the Enterprise Mission released a detailed and graphic report predicting a major cataclysmic event stemming from Hale Bopp. They fixed the date as January 3, 1998 and even zeroed in on the impact time - 3:05 EST. The location, not surprisingly was New York. (The other thing I've noticed from doomsday books is never buy property in New York, California or Tokyo. They always take the direct impact of anything that comes along.)
The Enterprise Mission set up an elaborate website with a whole tableau of simulated images from an imaginary "WNN" News Special showing how their predictions were going to come true.
The Enterprise Project had it all down to the date, the place and the hour, but as we all know New York is still around. Nonetheless the Enterprise Mission has claimed that their prediction did come true, sorta. Okay, a massive asteroid didn't wipe out millions of people but they point to an article in the New York Times which states that a water main did break on Fifth Avenue on the day before the asteroid was about to hit.
Thank the stars for small mercies.

August 11, 1999 - King of Duds
What happens when you combine Aztec shamans, Fatima predictions and Nostradamus? You get big time catastrophe. This time the bull in the celestial china shop was the Comet Lee, supposedly predicted by all the great seers as heading straight for earth on August 11, 1999. Named in the oracles as the King of Terror, the planet killer failed to live up to the raves and life went on.

December 31, 2000 --Y2K
ZZZZZZZZZ

May 5, 2000 - Pole Shifts
I first came across the pole shift argument in the book Earthquake Generation. Written in 1978, it promised 20 good years of rumble and ruin leading up to the great flipping of the polar axis in the year 2000.
The cause was taken up more recently by Richard Noone who claimed that the event was predicted by Hopi legends.
"The twins had hardly abandoned their stations when the earth, with no one to control it, teetered off balance, spun around crazily, then rolled over twice."
Noone added to the mix the claim that he found the date May 5, 2000 scrawled on one of the Egyptian pyramid prophecies.
Noone thought we could stop the polar shift by placing giant, black, plastic mop heads in the sea to reverse the currents.
The mops were never built and the compass still points north.

October 13, 2000 - Blaze of Glory
How about another round of nuclear annihilation? This sure thing was predicted by the House of Yawheh fundamentalist cult in Abilene, Texas.
Since we've come unscathed through this one, it looks like we're safe until September 17, 2001. According to New age lecturer Moira Timms, this one is guaranteed.
Better get ready!

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