I feel like I should be documenting this since I guess it’s kind of historic—even though I personally am not experiencing the level anxiety one might expect at the end of the world.
The thing is, the climate change apocalypse scientists have been warning us about for the past decade or so (or longer) is upon us, but I feel fine. Well, my asthmatic lungs don’t feel fine what with the thick smoke that has been hanging in the air all week from the wildfires in Canada—Canada! So far away from my home in central Illinois in the United States, but the fires are just that bad.
The night sky is bright as the lighting strikes all around me. Two-inch hail is predicted. It would be nice if my new car was in a garage, but it’s already dented up from the hailstorm I drove into a couple of months ago. My car is so new, I’m still 1.400 miles away from my first oil change. This is going to be an increasingly regular weather phenomenon, so it would be great if car manufacturers could get to work on making cars with some sort of covering that bounces back when hit with hail instead of leaving pockmarks all over the danged car.
To be honest, I’m just happy it’s starting to rain again. We’ve been stuck in a drought pretty much all spring, and I’m tired of watering all the new shrubbery I just planted. I’m not looking forward to my next water bill, either! A couple of mornings ago, I walked out the door to go to work and noticed the grass was wet. It had been so long since it had rained, I almost couldn’t comprehend what had happened. I literally could not believe that it had actually rained. Meanwhile, other parts of the country are practically washing away because they’ve been getting so much rain.
This is all because of climate change, and it’s only going to get worse. But like I said, I don’t feel afraid. Nor am I the least bit surprised. No one is catching me off guard on this one. Scientists have been telling us this was coming. My personal reaction thus far seems to be simple weary acceptance.
Yup, here it is. We didn’t take care of Mother Nature, so she’s fixin’ to take care of our problems for us. Maybe even cull the herd a bit. She’ll still be here long after we’re gone.
As a fiction writer, I spend a lot of time studying people—their everyday behavior, emotions, motivations, reactions. I call it research. And I’m curious to watch how this all plays out at the individual human level. The people who are still living in denial are the ones I’ll be watching most carefully.
At what moment will they realize that the end times they waste so much of their lives worrying over are already here? How will they behave when that realization strikes? If I’m still here when that happens, I’ll be watching. Maybe I’ll even write them into a novel.
They expect an apocalypse to occur suddenly. They’re waiting for one spectacular event that will announce itself with trumpets blaring. They think there should be no question that it is happening when that time comes. For them, the end times should look like mass terror, blood running in the streets while pieces of the sky fall on us.
They don’t expect it to creep in slowly and surprise them, announcing itself to each individual only as the evidence of its existence impacts them personally in such a way that there is no longer any denial of what is happening. Though they will continue to try. They don’t know that there are people on this planet who have already been experiencing the end of days for decades.
For all that, I don’t believe this is the end of the world. Mother Nature will prevail. She’ll clean up our messes. She might wipe the forest floors with us, but maybe she’ll allow a handful of us to survive. Maybe she still believes we’re capable of learning from our mistakes. Maybe.
In the meantime, life goes on. We’ll still get up every day and go to work as long as we’re able. There will still be stores open where we can buy what we need. As long as there is money to be made from us, there will be someone there to take our money.
I’m not going to worry about it until I have to. It’s not the end of the world. It’s just the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine.
Recommended reading
Looking for some end-of-times reading? I recommend these novels:
- The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks Dalton
- Valley of the Bees (by yours truly)
- Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
- The Girl in Red by Christina Henry
- The Girl at the End of the World by Richard Levesque
- Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
- When the English Fall by David Williams
- The Scarring Underneath by T.S. Dickerson
Or if you’d rather write your own apocalypse novel, check out my new website project where I’ll walk you through the steps of the writing process to finish writing your novel now rather than a decade from now.
Write on the World 