Apocalypse Now and Then

What is "normal" on an orbiting, wobbling, freezing, erupting planet?

For the past seven summers, I’ve wandered through Montana, Idaho, and Oregon in Scarlett Jovansson, my red Sprinter van. Bumping along remote logging roads that wind along clear, cold streams through forests, breathing in the piney breeze, it’s easy to feel like I’m reconnecting to some earlier, purer incarnation of Mother Nature, pristine and in perfect balance.

But that’s just comforting bullshit.

Those streams are clear alright, and pretty much devoid of life as well. After a century or two of repeated logging, the topsoil runoff has long since suffocated most of the fish, frogs, and other creatures that once lived in those waters. Look closely, and you’ll start to notice more of what isn’t there: birds, underbrush, any species of tree other than Douglass fir and Ponderosa pine. Not much diversity of any kind. The towering “forests” are actually plantations: as much a mono-crop as the endless, uniform cornfields of Iowa.

And even these fake forests aren’t what they seem, as most roads have a strip of undisturbed trees a hundred or so meters deep on either side, to block the view of the clear-cut devastation beyond. Nature, it seems, isn’t all that natural these days.

(photo by Tim Giraudier)

I’ve had similar thoughts concerning the native people who lived on this continent a few centuries ago. The story we’ve all heard is that they were in harmony with the natural world until we showed up and everything went to hell. It’s true that the steady invasion of Europeans was a huge disaster for the people they encountered. But “harmony” wasn’t exactly what was disrupted.

Turns out, the Comanche, Lakota, Cheyenne and other plains Indians who famously relied on horses to hunt buffalo had never seen a horse until, at the earliest, the 1600s. All the horses in the Americas were descended from a few that ran off from Cortes and his band of merry murderers as they were busy decimating the Aztecs in the mid-sixteenth century. Smallpox, also brought across the Atlantic by the Spanish, swept through native populations, killing millions of people who’d had no direct contact with Europeans or any idea what was happening to them or why. By the time Europeans were actually exploring the Americas, they found vast abandoned settlements and fallow fields that had been under cultivation until recent decades. There was no balance to disrupt. Things were already well off the rails.

I don’t write this to excuse any of the horrors of colonialism, and of course, those two examples are both attributable to the arrival of Europeans. But go back before any European contact and you’ll find overwhelming evidence of severe drought and disruption in the southwest US, civilizational collapse in the Mayan world of central America, the rise of the literally bloodthirsty Aztec empire, expansionist slave-holding tribes of the Pacific northwest, a spreading Inca empire in the Andes, and countless other examples of rapid, radical, disruptive changes happening all over the place. No balance. No stasis. Everything was changing.

I’ve been thinking about the wider implications of our habitual assumption of antediluvian equilibrium. I interviewed a climate scientist for my podcast recently, and one of the things that arose in our conversation is the fact that the Earth’s climate is constantly moving through cyclic changes in response to changes in the angle of our planet’s tilted axis and permutations in its orbital path around the Sun. Ice ages come and go and come again. (The next glaciation is overdue — quite possibly delayed by the carbon we’ve been spewing into the atmosphere.) The sea level rises and falls hundreds of feet. Oceanic currents speed, slow, reverse, and start over. The entire planet and all its various systems are, in effect, constantly breathing, changing, adjusting.

549 - Charlie Zender (Climate Scientist)

It strikes me that much of my own anxiety about climate change is based on the assumption that the planet would glide along smoothly if we weren’t messing it up. But things are rarely “fine,” and when they are, it’s just for a while.

Here’s a partial list of things that would at least cripple civilization, if not destroy it entirely, and roughly how frequently they occur:

— coronal mass ejections from the Sun or CME:

Research has indicated that phenomena such as the Carrington Event [when a burst of solar radiation melted telegraph lines in the western US in 1859] may not be as rare as once thought. A much weaker magnetic storm brought down the Canadian Hydro‐Québec system in 1989. Such an event would knock out power distribution systems, GPS signaling networks, personal computers, phones, navigational systems in aircraft, and so on.

In July 2012, NASA and European spacecraft watched an extreme solar storm erupt from the sun and narrowly miss Earth. “If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” said Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado at a NOAA Space Weather Workshop. “It might have been stronger than the Carrington Event itself."¹

— Glaciers regularly spread over Europe/Canada (Last one lasted from about 22,000 years ago to about 12,000 years ago.)

Over the past million years, Earth’s globally averaged surface temperature has risen and fallen by about 5˚C in ice-age cycles, roughly every 100,000 years or so. In the coldest period of the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago, sea level was at least 120 meters lower than today because more water was locked up on land in polar ice sheets. The last 8,000 years, which includes most recorded human history, have been relatively stable at the warmer end of this temperature range. This stability enabled agriculture, permanent settlements and population growth.²

— Massive asteroid strikes, which happen every few million years, according to NASA, set the entire planet ablaze.

— Supervolcano eruptions. In terms of geological time, they happen pretty often, too. The Youngest Toba eruption that occurred around 74,000 years ago may well be recorded in our DNA. Many scientists who study such things believe this event caused a global volcanic winter of six to ten years and possibly a 1,000-year-long cooling episode, as well as the near-extinction of our ancestors (and many other mammals. Genetic evidence suggests that we are all descended from a very small population of between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs that existed about 70,000 years ago.³

— Let’s not even talk about viruses, neither those that result from some idiot having sex with a chimp nor those that escape from a lab because some other idiot forgot to change the filters on the HEPA system.

— Let’s not talk about nuclear accidents either — or our increasingly fragile agricultural/shipping/energy/water systems, all of which can grind to a halt at any moment, as we’ve all learned all too well.

There’s a wonderful book called, The Long Summer, by Brian Fagan that shows how everything we know, all of human history, has occurred in a highly unusual period of literally “extra-ordinary” climatic calm. The “long summer” of the title is the Holocene warming trend of the last 15,000 years, which has coddled humanity in unusually stable warmth throughout recorded history. But this is not normal. Normal is a shitstorm. Normal is massive floods and crazy storms and ices sheets a mile thick covering France and Canada and tidal waves and volcanic eruptions and asteroid strikes. That’s normal. What we think of as normal is, in fact, anything but.

So yes, climate change is a problem. A big one. But life on this planet is all about big problems. And the inconvenient truth is that there is no getting away from climate change. The climate on this planet changes, constantly, whether we’re messing with it or not. Sometimes it changes surprisingly quickly.

In his fantastic book, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Future of the Earth, Craig Childs quotes Jose Rial, a chaos researcher and climate scientist he visits on an ice sheet in west Greenland: “By its very nature, change is highly unpredictable,” Jose tells Craig, “and nature by itself changes rapidly. It is a very unstable system.” Indeed, the evidence is clear that previous “long summers” like our own have ended in the duration of a human lifespan, shifting from temperate comfort into full-on ice age in as little as a century.

The word “apocalypse,” coming from the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, means revelation. That which is uncovered, shown, suddenly obvious. It comes from the Greek word ἀποκάλυψις (apokálupsis), which literally means to remove the lid. So apocalypse isn’t primarily about destruction of what’s here at the moment, it’s about the revelation of what always was and will underlie our desperate delusion of safety and stability. Apocalypse reveals the fundamental truth that no summer lasts forever.

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This video is worth a watch, if you’d like to know more about the climatic cycles of the Earth.

1. tp://www.arrl.org/news/a-perfect-coronal-mass-ejection-could-be-a-nightmare

2. https://www.science.org.au/learning/general-audience/science-climate-change/2-how-has-climate-changed#:~:text=Over%20the%20past%20million%20years,so%20(Figure%202.1a).

3. As is the case with most such theories, this one is disputed. The eruption occurred for sure, and spread a layer of distinctive ash all over the planet, but whether this caused near-extinction of humans and other mammals and/or triggered a 1,000 year cooling event is up for debate. See, for example, this article summarizing the argument against the Toba bottleneck theory.