The End: Natural Disasters, Manmade Catastrophes, and the Future of Human Survival - Hardcover

  PART ONESo What’s the Problem?ONEDoomsday As a State of MindAll kinds of terrible things could happen, and the universe of terrible things is so large that some of them probably will.—Stephen Pacala, Princeton University ecologist
Well there it is, in a nutshell: doomsday as a state of mind. This is not to say that Pacala was wrong, exactly—he was in any case talking about climate change and its effects on the biosphere, and not about the End of Days—but the style of thinking perfectly matches the anxious modern mood. Consider how accustomed (though not inured) we have all become to the vocabulary of catastrophe. Tsunami, earthquake, volcano, hurricane, pandemic, cosmic and UV radiation, comets in collision—these things used to worry us, from time to time, and certainly they used to panic those directly affected, but they weren’t really part of the background noise of our culture. Now they are. The Christmas tsunami that swept through the Indian Ocean in 2004 washed up directly into our living rooms and into our forebrains. We have all seen the hapless victims picking through the rubble after an earthquake in Turkey, Greece, Pakistan, Japan, Peru; the fallen Californian expressway crushing the cars below is replayed every time the Earth shakes somewhere; San Francisco (the “crack in the edge of the world,” Simon Winchester called it), Krakatoa, Mount St. Helens, hurricanes Katrina and Rita and Wilma and Dean, a deadly tornado ripping apart a small town in Kansas, the suffocation of all the people in a clutch of villages in Cameroon—we all know all these things, for we’ve seen them and heard them and watched the wailing and lamentation that inevitably follows, an intimate shorthand of calamity. As the number of intense hurricanes began to increase, as the earthquake-caused tsunami flattened coastal towns all around the Indian Ocean, as a massive earthquake toppled cities on the Roof of the World in Pakistan, as the weather turned more and more bizarre and flooding and droughts and heat waves increased, as the dire warnings kept coming of Avian flu, SARS, Ebola, and assorted pandemics, so the global anxiety levels continued to escalate. Consider how the jargon of meteorology has already become common currency—frontal systems, Category Four storm, Saffir-Simpson scale, isobars, extra-tropical cyclone, and the rest—who knew these things before? Global warming with its array of hitherto obscure gases—methane, chlorofluorocarbons, ozone—has seeped out of the scientific journals to become a basic part of popular discourse. Schoolchildren can now talk knowledgeably about antiretrovirals, bacterial infections, the collapse of immune systems ... . A survey even showed, bizarrely, that more people were aware of the wandering asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs than actually believed the dinosaurs had their place in the evolution of planetary life in the first place.Calamity has become not just a state of mind but a majority state of mind. “The world can now expect three to five major disasters a year that will each kill more than 50,000 people”—when this piece of advice was published in 2005, as an analysis of natural trends by the insurance giant Munich Re, hardly anyone turned a hair. It seemed merely obvious—during the next twelve months, you are almost certainly going to be reading about one or two, perhaps three, natural calamities that each kills many thousands of people. The chances of your being one of the victims are still small, but the chances of there being many victims approaches 100 percent. It has become normal. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists still keeps its doomsday clock, a dismal relic of the dismal Cold War and the prospect of nuclear winter, but when it solemnly advanced the clock to five minutes to midnight, a result, it said, of a worsening climate and increasing nuclear proliferation, most media outlets gave it a paragraph or two, no more. Ho-hum, another disaster forecast.

Perhaps it was always thus, but not in all cultures and not to the same degree. I once asked a member of the Dogon tribe of Mali, of all African tribes perhaps the one with the most complex cosmology interwoven into its religious beliefs, about this notion of the end of the world. I wanted to know how he thought the end would come; he was the grandson of the tribe’s most famous seer and would no doubt have something interesting to say. But he merely looked puzzled. Why should it end? People end, yes, so do animals, even the tricky jackal. Good times end, and so do droughts. But the world just is.Worlds populated by families or tribes of gods typically don’t end. The Haida of the American northwest, whose complex myths have been shown to have tracked, and then predicted, natural calamities like earthquakes and tsunamis (as we shall see) nevertheless were unable to imagine everything actually ending. The gods might make wars on each other, and throw each other down, and in their skirmishings people are battered and bruised, but the world persists. The ancient Greeks invented perhaps the most quarrelsome family of gods in world history, gods who could and did bring ruin to people in their battles (Vulcan’s forge was Vesuvius, rumbling the world as he made mighty weapons for the endless wars waged by his brothers and sisters), but the world itself was untouched. Self-evidently, cosmologies that included resurrection and eternal self-improvement (Hinduism, Buddhism) could make no room for the End, though they too were not shy of prophecy. For example, after the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, a religious leader named Mata Amritanandamayi, usually just known as Amma, attributed the increasing number of natural calamities to a radical decline in dharma, or righteousness; her advice was to instruct devotees to leave everything to the will of God and face all difficulties with courage, which seems helpful.It was left, then, to the mighty monotheisms to codify and attribute apocalypse: “And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the Earth is filled with violence through them and behold, I will destroy them with the Earth.” Well, he didn’t. But he did have a crack at it.Perhaps this attention to apocalypse is not so surprising. These theisms were born in the Levant and Mesopotamia (what we in our Eurocentric way call the Middle East), a crucible of planetary unrest: the earthquakes, floods, pestilences, and droughts that so frequently occurred there were preserved for millennia in folk memory. If the Jehovah of the Jews was a cruel and vindictive lord, perhaps he was a reflection of the landscape into which he was imagined. It is hard not to see something real in the gloomy recountings of the book of Revelation, the most apocalyptic, not to say paranoid, of all biblical texts:
And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as if it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers and upon the fountain of the waters; and the name of the star is called wormwood, and the third part of the waters became wormwood, and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter; and the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise ... .
Something very like these events did happen, from time to time—recorded not only in the long memories of human scribes but also in the very rocks of the Earth. The calamities they describe would have been profound enough to burn into long tribal memory. Just as the Haida remember the wars between Eagle and Wind, the Old Testament authors remembered the fury of Jehovah: “And lo, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the Earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs when she is shaken by a mighty wind. ...” The fig tree is a nice homely touch, giving away this story’s Mediterranean origins; maybe this was a kind of reportage, after all.In the Arabic world, where rebellion against a duly constituted ruler is both common and anathema, prolonged strife, or fitnah, is easily mistaken for the imminence of the Day of Judgment, a dire notion Islam shares with the less worldly among the Christians:
When the sun shall be darkened
When the stars shall be thrown down
When the mountains shall be set moving
When the pregnant camels shall be neglected
When the savage beasts shall be mustered
When the seas shall be set boiling
When the souls shall be coupled
When the buried infant shall be asked for what sin she was slain
When the scrolls shall be unrolled
When heaven shall be stripped off
When hell shall be set blazing
When Paradise shall be brought nigh
Then shall a soul know what it has produced.1
Christian documents are punctuated by the conflation of disaster with divine wrath. Saint Paul’s writing are full of such fear, though he nevertheless rather looked forward to the End of Days, confident it would come in his own time and that he himself would be among the elect of heaven.Such writings persist into modern times, especially among thinkers less eminent by far than the great disciple. In fact, the most entertaining doomsday speculations come from pseudo-swamis and addle-brained reverends across a dozen cultures—no one is really immune to this stuff. Even in technologically sophisticated America, as Sam Harris points out in his Letter to a Christian Nation,“about half our neighbors believe the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue ... .”2It should be no surprise that the wilder shores of the Internet are rife with conspiracy theories, doomsday scenarios, and the many ways in which scientists are trying to kill us all, or, rather more simply, with speculations that the world is going to end without any help from science—or from Satan, for that matter. There is no point cataloging them, for they are all similar enough in structure. It is interesting, though, that almost all of them, in these days, are underpinned by a “scientific” reading of some ancient or esoteric event.On the fringes of modern Christianity are those who firmly believe in the Rapture,3 the gathering up to Jesus of the faithful at the Second Coming, which of course is imminent (as it has been since Saint Paul’s day, although the term was actually introduced in the middle of the second century). Most mainstream denominations ignore the whole Rapture thing as a theological embarrassment; it appears in most concordances and biblical commentaries only as a curiosity, usually under a heading such as “eschatological events.” The fact that the fictional series called Left Behind, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, has sold gazillions of copies without the benefit of bookstores is usually cited as evidence of the theory’s penetration—but then Harry Potter sold equal gazillions, and no one thinks belief in witchcraft is rampant.Still, in fundamentalist circles, the Rapture is a given, and comforting it must be, because this is the time in which each Christian will receive his or her resurrected body and “shall be caught up together ... in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.” For everyone else, unbelievers, infidels, the unshriven, and the unsaved, tough luck. For them, Christ will return on a horse leading an army, who will exterminate one-third of the Earth’s population in a massive act of genocide.There’s one nice new technological wrinkle to all this. In October 2004 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved for human use a small rice-grain-sized device called an RFID (radio frequency identification device) produced by a firm named VeriChip, allowing it to be used for human implantation (it was already commonly used as an anti-theft device, in bookstores, for example) .VeriChips were intended for use in a number of health-care applications, allowing medical personnel to monitor patients at risk at a distance, through telemetry. Each VeriChip contains a unique ID number and can be tracked through the proprietary Global VeriChip Subscriber Registry. The technology also has obvious security implications. And what has all this to do with the Rapture? One of the precursor events is Satan’s marking of every human with the Mark of the Beast or, as Revelation 13:16-18 puts it,
And [the Antichrist] causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save [except] he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name; Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.
The modern Catholic church has interpreted this mysterious number as a coded reference to the Emperor Nero, through some abstruse reasoning that need not detain us here. For the Rapture folk, it is not really much of a stretch to conflate the number 666, Satan’s number, with VeriChip, although it represents something of a public relations blow to corporate marketing strategies.4

Once you start looking, you can see apocalyptic prophecies everywhere, resurgent now in these days of imminent ecological Armageddon, and as science is uncovering stranger and stranger under-levels to what was once thought to be reality.Even the newborn atheist Christopher Hitchens, in his polemic against religion and especially against the notion of intelligent design of the universe, expresses his own gloomy view of probable cataclysms:
[Our] vanity allows us to overlook the implacable fact that, of the other bodies in our own solar system alone, the rest are either far too cold to support anything recognizable as life, or far too hot. The same as it happens is true of our own blue and rounded planetary home, where heat contends with cold to make large tracts of it into useless wasteland, and where we have come to learn that we live, and have always lived, on a climatic knife edge. Meanwhile the sun is getting ready to explode and devour its dependent planets like some jealous chief or tribal deity.5
The end of the world is always nigh. Disappointed seers sometimes fade into oblivion, but most of them regroup. A nice example is the way modern fundamentalist Christian commentators have come to think that Saint Paul was not after all expecting Judgment Day in his own time—he can’t really have been wrong, can he? No, he was a saint, one of the biggies, surely infallible. He must really have been talking to the Christians of the twenty-first century, when the End is undoubtedly now scheduled.Scientists, ancient and modern, are far from immune. Isaac Newton, whose laws of motion are among the most famous in science and who is widely considered one of the great, if peculiar, scientific thinkers of all time, was also an alchemist and a mediocre theologian. In manuscripts recently discovered in the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem, the sage discussed his attempts to decode the Bible, which he believed contained God’s secret laws for the universe. He also predicted that the second coming of Christ would follow plagues and war and would result in a one-thousand-year re...