From Climate Change to Nukes to Plagues: The Coming End of the World as We Know It

            The end of all things has become a secular fascination.

            Consider, for example, just Margaret Atwood, all by herself. She’s written The Handmaid’s Tale—now an award-winning TV show on Hulu, and The Testaments, a Booker Prize short-listed sequel. Atwood has also written the MadAdam trilogy about a world destroyed by climate change, genetic engineering, and pharmaceutical malpractice.

            Post-apocalyptic, end-of-the-world fiction is all the rage. There’s Cormac McCarthy’s On the Road and the Hunger Games trilogy and Station Eleven and all of Hugh Howey and Stephen King and movies like World War Z and Resident Evil with their zombies and the Mad Max franchise, Deep Impact and Armageddon, TVs Walking Dead and on and on. 

            And now post-apocalypticism is an academic discipline too. So, for example, this week I read Bryan Walsh’s End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World, a summary of the existential angst that scientists are expressing. He writes:

            The end could be an asteroid. This has happened before. About 66 million years ago, an asteroid of about six miles across slammed into the earth. That explosion was 6500 times more powerful than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Dinosaurs that had ruled the earth for 180 million years went extinct. Meanwhile, thousands of asteroids continue to orbit the sun. NASA is tracking them, and we think we’re okay for the next few years, but nobody is saying it can’t happen again.

            Or, the world as we know it could end with a super volcano blowing its stack. One such volcano, Toba, blew its top about seventy-five thousand years ago. Global temperatures fell by about twenty or thirty degrees for several years after, bringing humans to the brink of extinction. Perhaps as few as three or four thousand survived, in Southern Africa, our ancestors. There are still about twenty active super volcanoes today. On average one erupts every 25,000 or 50,000 years. We’re due. 

            Third, Bryan Walsh also suggests that we could end the world as we know it by nuclear war. We thought that the end of the cold war reduced this threat. But now Putin and Trump have cancelled the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and things are looking rather dicier. And there are the other nuclear powers chomping at the bit: India and Pakistan have gone to war six times in the last 70 years. Israel has nukes. North Korea has nukes and threatens to use them every week. Iran wants nukes. This week Turkey threatened to go nuclear too. 

            Fourth, we could also end the world as we know it via climate change. The five hottest years in recorded history have all been in the past ten years. We are seeing more horrific tropical hurricanes like Dorian. We are going to see massive movements of people from areas in the world too hot to live, too flooded to live, or too arid to live, and, they all love to come here. 

            The end of the world could be a pandemic. It has happened before. Justinian’s plague in fifth century killed half the world’s population. The Black Death killed 200 million people. New diseases caused by animal infections jumping to humans, as in SARS or Ebola, are an annual event now. Eventually, one is going to be really deadly. 

            Bryan Walsh isn’t finished. He writes further long chapters about the dangers of bioengineered pathogens and terrorism, as in the MadAdam trilogy. He writes about Artificial Intelligence about which no less an expert than Stephen Hawking said, “could spell the end of the human race.” And he writes, only half-seriously now, about antagonistic aliens invading earth. Thankfully, he doesn’t mention vampires or zombies.

            So, how does all this gloom and doom make you feel?

            I find it fascinating that at the end of the book, Walsh says that he nevertheless has hope we’ll somehow make it, anyway. They thing is, Walsh doesn’t anchor his hope. He doesn’t give readers any good reasons for hope. Walsh just hangs hope out there, unsupported, as unlikely as a baby managing to hold onto a helium balloon on a windy day.

            In fact, Bryan Walsh actually gives us a reason for abandoning all hope. It is called scope neglect. Scope neglect describes how humans deal with tragedy—or rather, refuse to. When personal, as in the death of a loved one, tragedy may overwhelm us and even break us. But when larger and more extensive tragedies are distant—as is the case with the Bahamas, this week, for example—we tend to mostly ignore that tragedy, and carry on as if it never happened.

            Scope neglect. Paul Slovic, a Psychologist, found that our “sympathy can begin to fade as soon as we’re presented with two needy people, rather than one.” This counterintuitive arithmetic of compassion makes it hard for us to empathize with or prepare for huge natural disasters. Our brains do their best to push such thoughts away. “Instead of our worry increasing as the size of the consequence increases, it degrades. Our attention is scarce, and so is our ability to worry.”    

            So, Joseph Stalin is reputed to have said, after starving nearly four million Ukrainians to death: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths just a statistic.”

            And that is how it is when it comes to the end of the world. Scope neglect. We can’t get our heads around oceans rising, nuclear weapons falling or pandemics, even though the risks are very real. The scope of such disasters is just too large for us to think about. So, our brains ignore or actively deny such risks. 

            Even those we pay to look after the bigger picture, our politicians, seem totally paralyzed. Scope neglect, you see, also means their re-election depends on giving you what you want rather than all of us what the world most needs.

            One more thing, stands out for me, in Walsh’s book, something that is ironically hopeful. He discusses the prepper phenomenon. Preppers are people who prepare for the end of the world by provisioning themselves with food and survival gear, guns and more guns, hidden shelters and caches full of fuel and more food and even more guns. Preppers plan to survive the end of the world by hiding from it while living on in their shelters with their families, killing everyone who comes near. Preppers. It’s a big thing in the USA.

            But it was Walsh’s analysis of Prepper strategy that got my attention. He writes that, “Sociologists who study post-catastrophe societies report that communities often grow tighter, like scar tissue that forms following a wound, even as they endure what seems unendurable.” What is remarkable about all the past disasters that almost drove humans to extinction is that it was human cooperation that saved them, human kindness for their neighbours, human struggling to carry each other’s loads that got humans through these crises. It was the village that survived, rather than the individual prepper; the community that created the conditions for survival, not hidden caches of food.

            Which brings me to one of Jesus’ (several) failed predictions about the coming apocalypse. In making one of those predictions, in Mark 8, Jesus said, in the same breath, “if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Jesus added, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

            The point worth remembering here is that as Jesus faced the end of the world as he knew it, Jesus turned his back on scope neglect by picking up a cross on behalf of his neighbours to save their lives rather than his own. And he invites us to do the same, to save other lives, rather than our own.

            You see, cross carrying, Jesus’ crucifixion, was a subversive political act by one for the many, in the face of injustice, theological incompetence, and the painful suffering of his compatriots. Cross carrying is the invention of nonviolent resistance of the sort that Martin Luther King or Gandhi engaged in. Jesus’ cross was his refusal to be cowed by scope neglect and his insistence on doing something, even if it was costly to him personally, for the sake of all. Jesus’ cross was his way of saying we can make a stand when the odds seem impossible, and our stand can make a difference, if not now, then in a generation or two or maybe even a thousand years. Jesus’ crucifixion laid the groundwork for a new kind of morality that would eventually subvert Rome’s oppression by prioritizing neighbours.

            Scope neglect is people who refuse to think more deeply about the world than the taxes they must pay or the pleasures they do not wish to forgo. But humans are not bound by that approach. We can, for the sake of the world, carry each other’s—the world’s—crosses, doing whatever it takes artistically or business-wise, politically or at our service clubs, doing whatever it takes religiously or in our schools or labs or by donating or volunteering or in our FB posting--doing whatever it takes to see to not only our comfort but the world’s survival.

            Look. I don’t have a blueprint for where your area of skill or opportunity is. Discovering it will take your own act of imagination. Making your contribution might well involve a change of priorities or habits or generosity.

            But go for it. Pick up a cross and do your small but costly part to save the world.

Preaching Climate Change

            One Friday, before Joe left for work downtown, he opened his Waze app and typed in “work” as his destination. Waze continuously tracks all of its users while they drive, and by doing so, maps out the fastest route to any destination. Along the way, Waze uses the electronics, algorithms, street maps, computer code, and even geography to do so. It is a very cool app. And so, though Joe didn’t understand the engineering or science behind Waze, he loves how it saves time, every day. He trusts it.

            This morning, Joe’s drive was not without incident. He listens to Radio 590, The Fan. But Joe accidentally hits a button on his steering column, and his kid’s rap music comes on. So, Joe takes his eyes off the road to change the station back, for just a second, and in that moment, a car in front of him slams on its brakes. Joe would have hit that car except that his car automatically slammed on its brakes too, sensing that an accident was imminent. Joe didn’t even know his new car had an accident avoidance system—but this morning the engineering and science behind it saved him anyway. Joe was impressed.

            At work, early, Joe booted up his computer and surfed over to 23andMe, a genealogical research lab that reads your DNA and compares it to the DNA of other people who have sent theirs in. A few months ago, Joe sent 23andMe some saliva in a tube. Joe is an adopted child and has never been able to connect with his birth family. This morning, Joe’s results have finally been posted. He discovers three likely second cousins. Joe doesn’t know it yet, but later that month, as a result of this DNA matching, he is going to meet his birth-grandparents. The science is way above his head, but he trusted the biologists enough to give it a whirl. 

            That afternoon, Joe knocks off early. He’s going to fish for brook trout at his cottage with his buddies. Joe doesn’t know this, but forty years ago, his lake nearly died due to acid rain. When scientists raised the alarm, Ronald Reagan and Pierre Trudeau enacted a series of laws to reduce Sulphur emissions, so that Joe’s lake and many more like it are now full of fish. In fact, thanks to those scientists, he’s always counted on catching them.

            Joe buys and sells bonds for a living. He has a good life. Between algorithms he doesn’t understand, the engineering in his car, nuclear DNA and mitochondrial genome science that is way over his head, and governmental action on Sulphur and ozone emissions, science has made his life a lot better. He’s also a two-time cancer survivor, thanks to MRIs, radiation treatment, and new chemo drugs. He never doubted that his doctors were the best, and would use the best techniques to heal him. And now, he hopes to live a long, happy life.

            Modern sciences: math, engineering, biology, chemistry, have made our lives better. Joe hardly thinks to thank the Nobel prize winners, GM engineers, 23andMe biologists or Sunnybrook doctors for all this good stuff, though. He takes it in stride. He expects it. We all do. We hardly ever say prayers of thanksgiving for these gifts—unless it’s under our breath, as when Joe muttered, “thank god,” when he avoided an accident. We trust today’s science and the scientific method it uses, and depend on it for the most comfortable lives humans have ever lived.

            Anyway, Joe and his buddies go to the cottage. They catch a lot of fish. And at the end of the day, they light a fire down on the beach, pour themselves a scotch and talk. Of course, they do. It’s the good life.

            Eventually the conversation turns to climate change. A new government has come into power. It has cancelled several environmental programs. A new leader has publicly expressed doubt as to whether or not climate science can be trusted or whether anything can be done about warming temperatures, anyway. 

            “Yah,” says Joe. “I don’t believe in it either. How can they know? Do these scientists think they’re gods? Anyway, the weather changes every week, every year,” says Joe. “Two winters ago? It was cold. Water main burst in front of the house. Basement flooded. Don’t talk to me about climate change. It’s a hoax. Some pointy headed guys in lab coats trying to get promotions. I’m with Ford and Trump and the pipeline companies on this.”

            Well, what do think? Is climate change a hoax or not?  Canyoutrust the overwhelming consensus of scientists when it comes to climate change? Like you trust your doctor or the physicist who figured out how to make MRI machines work? Or here is another question. Even if—and there isn’t, but let’s just pretend—even if there was doubt about the long- and short-term impact of climate change, would you dare take a chance on it? Cross your fingers and hope for the best, because that is easier than doing something about it? Like, would you drive your car if the brake pressure light went on? And for how long? How much are you willing to risk to leave the status quo alone?

            Look, we all depend on the findings and theories of science, every day, for every piece of our good lives. We trust the science behind auto radar and Waze, the science that makes computers work and that predicts tides and eclipses. We trust the science of DNA to find relatives and rapists, and we have, in the past, trusted scientists to clean our air and reduce acid rain and clean up the great lakes. 

            And now, scientists tell us that climate change—unless we act now—is going to transform our world so dramatically, so fundamentally, that our grandchildren are going to suffer serious harm to their living standards. It will result in massive movements of climate-change refugees unlike anything we have seen so far. Climate change will contribute to the largest extinction events since the dinosaurs. 

            Mind you, it isn’t a few lone scientists saying so. All of them are saying so—or, at least, such a high percentage of them that I wouldn’t want to bet a plug nickel on the tiny, tiny group of them that still question some aspects of these trends. The latest report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns us that unless serious efforts are made over the next ten years to change course, it will be too late. I won’t go through all the data here, since tons of it is at your fingertips. Read the report yourself. But I warn you that there are some groups out there, mostly funded by libertarian or very partisan industry organizations, that try to tell a completely different story to provide cover for a certain brand of politicians to deny, deny, deny. History will roundly condemn these short-term, me-first, see-no-evil, hear-no-evil leaders.

            Meanwhile, as a society we refuse to deal with more and stronger hurricanes, and rising sea levels, and dying corals, and plunging insect and amphibian populations, and droughts in Africa so severe that whole peoples are migrating to Europe, or drowning to get there. 

            Here in the West, our wealth and—to some extent—our geography, may protect us somewhat in the short term. But you just wait.

            The writer of Psalm 19 exalts God for the beauty of creation. But he, or she—the Psalmist was most likely a man—also warns his audience that when it comes to God’s laws, including stewardship of the beautiful garden of creation; when it comes to God’s laws it takes an act of will to abide by them and uphold them. You have to choose. The Psalmist warns us not to be fooled. He says:

            “Clear me from hidden faults. Keep back your servant from the insolent; do not let them have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless, and innocent of great transgression.” And who are the insolent? I’d say those who, for whatever personal or financial or political reasons, would rather, for short-term gain, destroy the earth as we know it than make costly, sacrificial changes today.

            When it comes to climate change, false prophets are crying, “Peace, Peace” when there is no peace. And if enough Joes choose these prophets of all’s well instead of serious climatologists who dare to tell the truth in difficult times, you can be sure that ruin and defeat will follow for us as surely as it did for Old Testament Israel.

            So, what is it going to be? Are we going to go with our most comfortable, uniformed hunches, the ones that require no sacrifice, no changes in habits, no tax increases, no action on behalf of the planet or its creatures or our children? Or will we make big sacrifices, like our great-grandparents did during the depression, and our grandparents did during the Second World war—will we make big sacrifices in what we buy and how we vote, how we run our corporations and which ones we invest in—will we make big changes now, for the sake of—well, everything good that we have taken for granted for too long?

            An idyllic future will not fall into our children’s laps, from the heavens, regardless of the choices we make. Joe—who otherwise would never question the opinion of a single scientist, never mind a scientific consensus—Joe and the insolent politicians who have his ear are, biblically speaking, fools. Peace, when it comes to climate change, peace must be waged by us, now, tooth and claw, urgently, if we are going to turn the corner on this.

            The heavens may declare the glory of God, but right now the earth is crying in agony because of human idiocy. I wish I could say something more comfortable this morning. I wish I could say something more constructive. I wish I didn’t have to say anything about this at all. 

            But this morning, Joe is not going to have the last word, at least not here. We are in serious crises, as serious as that of the cold war or the bubonic plague. And, until we act, personally and as a society, to tackle climate change, you will not hear “peace, peace,” from me.

The Fear and Dread of You: A Modern Flood Story

            Post-apocalyptic, dystopian novels are all the rage right now. One of the best-known ones is Margaret Atwood’s early book The Handmaid’s Tale. Hulu’s television series based on the novel won five Emmy’s this year, including Best Dramatic Series. But there is also Atwood’s more recent Maddaddam trilogy, Stephen King’s The Stand, Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games, and the Silo series of books by Hugh Howey. Even The Game of Thrones is in its own way dystopian and alt-apocalyptic. These books are all about the end of the world and how people do—or don’t—survive it.

What a Pleasant Story!

            The best-selling post-apocalyptic story of all time is found in the Bible. It is the story of Noah’s Ark. In the Flood story, nearly all the world’s population is killed in a global flood that makes Hurricane Harvey or Irma or Maria seem like spring showers by comparison. Only a dozen or so people, Noah’s family, survive Noah’s flood. The Flood Story is told with a minimum of detail, but it is easy to imagine what it suggests: doomed humans crying for mercy at the shut door of the Ark. Drowned bodies floating everywhere. As in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, not a bird or butterfly nor even a windswept leaf flitters across the sky. In the Bible’s post-apocalyptic Flood Story, everyone and everything dies, except for Noah and his family and a few animals.

            So, it’s interesting, don’t you think, that we rarely think of the Noah’s Flood story as a post-apocalyptic, dystopian story. In fact, we mostly remember it in the exact opposite way. The story of how animals, two by two, enter or exit the ark is found in every children’s Bible story book. And the pictures are pretty, aren’t they! So many happy bumble bees and monkeys, parrots and chameleons!

            There is no hint, in these pictures of the Flood Story, that it was a cataclysm. Given the actual story in the Bible, these pictures make about as much sense as putting party dresses and tuxes on Hurricane Irma survivors holed up in some stadium. In doing so, these pretty pictures also deny the hard practical and theological issues at the core of the Flood Story.

            At first glance, the hard issue at the core of the Flood Story might seem to be the question, “How can a loving God do such an evil thing?” Theologians call answers to this sort of question, “theodicy.” But actually, that is not the hard question the flood story tackles—at least for whoever wrote it.

            That’s because the Biblical Flood Story, and its earlier Babylonian and Akkadian versions, were written in an era, more than four thousand years ago, when people just presumed that the gods were responsible for everything that happened. Religious scholars call this stage of religious development the “Age of Enchantment.” The gods made babies and decided when old men and women would die; the gods sent plagues and droughts and rain and harvests. They might be persuaded but they were also unaccountable. In that prescientific tradition, the only way to tell the Noah’s Ark story was to make God the one who sent the flood. And while we might find that portrait of God objectionable today (I certainly do), the writers and audience of that time could not even have imagined a different scenario.

            What did surprise the first audience for this story, I think, was its emphasis on human morality and responsibility. In chapter six, before the flood, we are told that humans did evil things. They did so much evil that it stunk all the way to heaven. The earth was, quote, “filled with violence.” The world’s population was corrupted to the core and needed to be cleansed, says the writer of Genesis.

            This is a new thing in the Hebrew version of the Flood story. In the more ancient Babylonian and Akkadian versions of the same story, God destroys the world with a flood not because humans are doing evil, but because there are too many of them, and because their partying and noise making were keeping the gods awake.

            In Noah’s story, however, not only does God want more humans—we twice read that Noah’s family should be fruitful and multiply—but God wants humans to be good. This concern with morality, with human righteousness, is a near first in human literature. And in the Flood Story, it is the main, surprising point of the whole narrative. God sees that “the wickedness of humankind was great, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their heart was only evil.” So, for that reason, God decides to destroy the world. Except that, “Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.” Noah was, quote, “a righteous man, blameless in his generation.” He did, quote, “all that God commanded him.” In Noah’s story, both the evil that most humans do, and the good that a few humans do, are the story’s central concerns. And so, along the way, we learn that doing good is what God wants from humans.

            Now, according to this myth, after the flood, and after Noah pleases God with aromatic burnt-offerings, God promises never to destroy the world’s population and flora and fauna with a flood again. God gives humans the rainbow, too, as a sign of his promise to make sure the earth is never destroyed again. But then, in chapter nine, there follow some very strange words. God says to Noah, “The fear and dread of you [humans] shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered . . .”

            As the story of the flood ends, with its focus on human responsibility to do good, God warns humans that because they are powerful, because they are moral agents who can bless or curse the world they live in, the dread of humans lies over creation. Or, to put it in plainer English, because humans are powerful, all of creation is going to be afraid of humanity. God promises that he will never destroy the earth again, but the story doesn’t say—just warns--what people might do. And creation’s plants and animals know it, and so they are afraid. The Flood Story ends with a reminder that it is up to humans to do good—or bad, for better or for worse, for all of the earth.

            Hurricanes like Harvey, Irma, and Maria are in the news. For weeks, now, headlines have been all about people on rooftops, people drowning, levees breaking, record rainfalls, islands evacuated, and more on the way. We’ve also heard President Trump say he would do a better job of rescuing people than any president ever before . . . though he said nothing about what humans have probably done to influence this run of bad weather in the first place. So floods are on our minds.

            And the central concern of the Biblical Flood Story—human agency and responsibility, human power to do good or ill to the earth—ought still be our central concern. Because, figuratively, anyway, the dread of humanity continues to rest on every animal of the earth, on every biome, on every forest and sea. And for good reason.

            We have given creation lots of reasons to dread us. We have ravaged this planet. From the collapse of the cod stock in Atlantic Canada to the poisoning of Pacific salmon stocks through the inadvertent release of farmed Atlantic Salmon on the West Coast last month; from global warming due to human greenhouse gasses that are likely a factor in the increasing number and severity of hurricanes, to the die off of tens of thousands of square miles of Western forests due to the fact that winters are no longer severe enough to kill borer beetles; from the lack of building regulations that make Houston a trap for flood damage to the excess of plastic garbage in the seas, killing all sorts of flying and swimming and creeping wildlife—no wonder the dread of us humans lies heavy on creation because we have shown, again and again, that, overall, taking care of creation is not a human priority.

            And matters will improve only if we understand one of the key themes at the heart of the story of the flood: the plight of this planet is our responsibility, and not God’s. We are this planet’s moral agents. We are the ones who can pass laws and change habits and create infrastructure, and only we can pay the price—in personal habits and taxes—to make things right, or not. We are the parents and aunts and uncles of the children and great grandchildren who will live with what we do fifty and a hundred years from now. Our lifestyles and choices about whether foreign aid should be measured in tanks and guns or schools and agricultural technology make all the difference in Sub-Saharan Africa, and make the difference for how many refugees from Africa will trek to Europe or here to escape hunger, poverty, and violence caused, in no small measure, by our economic choices, our global warming, our power politics and consumerism. 

            The Flood Story, in its historical context, wasn't concerned with theodicy. But the Flood Story,  in our era, does invite us to reflect on anthrodicy--on explanations or justifications or condemnations for the evil set loose in the world by we humans.

            I wish I could write, “don’t worry, God will never destroy the world again. All dystopian post-apocalyptic novels and movies are just fiction.” But I cannot, because the point of the Flood Story is that even if God isn’t going to destroy it all, it is actually now up to us to decide whether we will usher in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future for our planet—or bless it and our descendants after us.