A Google search of the word apocalypse brings up just over 250 million hits.  According to the classical arrangement, the end of days will be marked by an epic battle of Star Wars proportions at the hallowed site of Armageddon, finally settling the score between the doomsayers of the religious right, and the same sex marrying, baby killing, premarital boning demagogues living in the pit of sin and vice.  Unfortunately, whoever penned the old testament forget to include the date, forcing us to live in a perpetual state of anxiety about when the Messiah might finally show up again, a little like having constant mental diarrhea.  The Mayans, on the other hand, were nice enough to tell us exactly when the world is going to end, December 21, 2012, but they failed to tell us how. Human cultures have long been obsessed with predicting how, when and where our civilization will collapse, creating elaborate fantasies about the wrath of some almighty force, but something happened in the 20th century that changed all of that, we learned how to do it ourselves.

The weaponization of nuclear fission gave human beings the ability to bring about our own destruction, creating a brand new hubris about the end of days.  Popular culture of the Cold War period was enthralled with the coming onset of nuclear winter, leading to predictions of what a post-nuclear planet would look like, and how we could each individually survive a blast.  Since then, although the hubris around nuclear winter has quieted, there has been a growing trend in the film, television and literature industries to creating fictions about what this post-apocalyptic world will look like.  Will we descend into neo-tribal societies, petrol crazed and driven to cannibalism, locked in some life or death struggle with technology and technocratic oligarchs, fighting off some sort of deadly infection (zombie related or otherwise), or simply struggling to survive on a dying planet where natural cycles have shut down?  

The ready available stream of entertainment simply filed under the subheading, ‘post-apocalyptic’ speaks to a growing addiction to life in the end of days, but is the shift in pop culture towards this view of society actually standing in the way of confronting modern crises? 

Climate change is increasingly finding a place in popular thought as the next real threat to human civilization, and for good reason.  Books such as George Monbiot’s Bring on the Apocalypse, or William Marsden’s discussion of the Alberta Tar Sands which threatens the oncoming “Environmental Armageddon” are the base for which fiction writers and movie makers have began extrapolating and describing just how a changing climate will spell the end of our days.  2004’s The Day After Tomorrow was probably the most expensive, over the top depiction of a climate driven apocalypse, drowning New York City and sending tornados down Hollywood Boulevard.  One problem with this is, that by creating heroic narratives in world-ending scenarios, or post apocalyptic stories of redemption, we risk trivializing the reality of changes in our global ecosystem. 

There is a discourse emerging that global issues are simply "too big to fail", and that the average individual is woefully unable to confront ecological destruction effectively.  Some scientists and writers have even moved past confronting the immediate effects of a changing climate and are examining what will happen to the planet after we have brought the human race to extinction.  There is an emerging argument against averting catastrophic climate shifts that simply questions whether or not we were destined to kill ourselves off, and that ‘the planet will survive’, as if it is somehow a heroic sacrifice on our part to march into extinction with head held high.  What is failed to  be taken into account, is that in doing so, human beings will take over 50% of the species on this planet with them, acidifying oceans and altering the very face of this planet. 

We need to remember something, just like nuclear war, a climate fueled end of days requires human beings to act.  It is our actions that are destroying this planet, drop by drop, tree by tree, and grain by grain of tar sand, and it is our actions which can save it.  Fetishizing the apocalypse, and dreaming of lives running with outlaw road gangs or battling the undead simply allows the interest of a few to determine the lives of many.  It being the week that began with Martin Luther King day in the United States, I defer to him to conclude, from his Beyond Vietnam speech:

"A time comes when silence is betrayal." .... The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.