Or, The Rebound Effect of False Hope?

The belief that the Mayan Calendar says the world will end in 2012 was gutted by the recent discovery of their “astronomical faculty lounge” in Guatemala. As TIME magazine writes, “Here’s what’s not going to happen this year: the earth won’t end on Dec. 12; it won’t be swallowed by a black hole, consumed by the sun or get taken out by a collision with the imaginary planet Nibiru.”

I never thought the world was literally going to end in 2012. It just feels like a truism with all the crazy things happening in the world, and an easy meme to hang my hat on when discussing Armageddon scenarios. I feel like a lot of the zeitgeist around End of the World scenarios stems from concern about the global ecological and economic threats of our current hyper-stressed and over-stretched culture.

But I’m worried that the fact that the world isn’t going to end in December is going to give people too much hubris. The existential threat humans face in global ecocide climate change isn’t like the Heaven’s Gate Cult waiting for the Sweet Chariot of Hale-Bopp Comet to come take them away. Just because the world exists on January 1^st 2013 doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods! Mass extinctions, ocean acidification, loss of resilience and diversity for species, ecosystems and cultures, shifting weather patterns… And so it goes.

Let’s not have a rebound effect on End Times. Because people, shit is not going well! Our societal trajectory is less of an ark, and more of a 9.82 m/s² acceleration towards the earth’s surface (a.k.a. falling for you non-science-y folks).

As Hugo says in La Haine, “there’s a man falling from a 50 story building. As he falls he tells himself, so far so good. So far, so good. (jusqu’ici tout va bien) But it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the landing.” If you haven’t seen this raw depiction of life in Parisian ghettos, and reflection on the harsh realities of racism, poverty and violence, it’s worth viewing.

Considering humanity’s amazingly resilient blinders when it comes to our momentum, I remember Daniel Quinn’s story in Ishmael where he describes civilization as riding a flying machine prototype with one tiny flaw – it doesn’t work.

“Everyone is looking down, and it’s obvious that the ground is rushing up toward you–and rushing up faster every year. Basic ecological and planetary systems are being impacted by the Taker Thunderbolt, and that impact increases in intensity every year. Basic, irreplaceable resources are being devoured every year–and they’re being devoured more greedily every year. Whole species are disappearing as a result of your encroachment–and they’re disappearing in greater numbers every year. Pessimists–or it may be that they’re realists–look down and say, ‘Well, the crash may be twenty years off or maybe as much as fifty years off. Actually it could happen anytime. There’s no way to be sure.’ But of course there are optimists as well, who say, ‘We must have faith in our craft. After all, it has brought us this far in safety. What’s ahead isn’t doom, it’s just a little hump that we can clear if we all just pedal a little harder. Then we’ll soar into a glorious, endless future, and the Taker Thunderbolt will take us to the stars and we’ll conquer the universe itself.’ But your craft isn’t going to save you. Quite the contrary, it’s your craft that’s carrying you toward catastrophe. Five billion of you pedaling away–or ten billion or twenty billion–can’t make it fly. It’s been in free fall from the beginning, and that fall is about to end.”

So feel free to breathe a sigh of relief on December 13^th, but don’t forget, the problems we face are real, vast, and not going to leave us like a comet’s orbit, but will hover until, at some point, we come crashing down.