We’re all doomed, again
Look, the world is going to end just three years from now.
This is the trailer for Roland Emmerich’s new film, 2012. The Mayans, it is said, predicted that 2012 would herald an apocalyptic global event. They were right. Chances are 2012 will be even worse than Independence Day. Boom boom.
The internet is currently full of fascinating, frequently bonkers stuff about 2012, as people argue over what exactly the Mayans were predicting. Some people think we will all die by nuclear bomb or asteroid. Others are more optimistic, predicting a cosmic shift, a new age of evolution, or similar. Other, more level-headed Mayan scholars point out that the whole idea of an ancient civilisation accurately predicting global events thousands of years in the future is dubious, to say the least. In the meantime, expect lots more movies designed to scare the crap out of us, like this one…
And this one, which isn’t 2012-related but borrows the idea of a sequence of dates predicting the end of the world…
The world probably isn’t going to end in 2012, of course. It’s going to happen around 50 years after that. I’m currently reading The Vanishing Face of Gaia by James Lovelock, and as a result I am absolutely terrified. Which I’m beginning to think is a healthy attitude. Unlike most climate change writing, Lovelock doesn’t pussyfoot around offering lists of ways you can reduce your carbon footprint, or encourage you to lobby governments to use renewable energy. His view is that it’s far too late for that (a couple of hundred years too late, in fact), that these are token gestures, that overpopulation is a much more serious problem than car fumes, that climate change’s horrors are now pretty much inevitable, and that we should focus on preparing ourselves for the worst. Here he is, upsetting environmentalists by suggesting that wind farms are basically a waste of everyone’s time and that nuclear power is the way forward…
Slightly offsetting my terror - but only slightly - is Lovelock’s argument that the world contains several lifeboat states, countries in the colder north of the world where the effects of climate change will be less severe. The UK is one of these (just about, although Scandinavia and Canada will be better off), particularly the north of the UK (ie: Scotland) which, unlike the south of England, may not end up under the water (although possibly not Leith, where I live - damn). These lifeboat states, Lovelock argues, should concentrate their efforts on growing food rather than building windfarms, so that they’re not dependent on the efforts of countries that will soon be devastated by global warming in order to feed their citizens. He recalls how Britain nearly starved during the Second World War because we were cut off from food imports (the Second World War is an analogy he comes back to a lot, its drama and bloodshed having shaped his formative years).
He wrote all this stuff about lifeboat states, he says in an early chapter, as a response to those people who said his last book was too pessimistic, which made me laugh out loud. It’s intended to offer hope for humanity. Reading it, though, I keep thinking he should have subtitled it ‘I’m going to die before all this happens so I don’t really care anymore.’ It’s brutal stuff, tough love at its most hard to take. Humanity can survive, he says, but only through strong leadership that is able to make tough decisions - ie: about who gets to be on the lifeboats, and who doesn’t. If everyone tries to get on a lifeboat, of course, it capsizes. It’s been interesting reading the reviews of the book - there’s an uneasy humour to the responses, which jokily describe him as a ‘prophet of doom’, but don’t tend to say that he’s wrong.
I’ve been reading all this just as I’ve been writing the final lyrics to our new album, so I should warn you that, if there was a bit of an end of the world show atmosphere to our first album (particularly on Drowning Nightmare 1, Regional and A Petrol Pump In The Cradle of Christianity), it’s a bit more pronounced on this one. The opening song, a big, stomping pop number, was going to be called Lorelei and Dorothy in Lifeboat Scotland, until Hamish quite reasonably objected on the grounds that it wasn’t very radio-friendly. I didn’t bother trying to talk him into my alternative suggestion, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 2: Gaia’s Revenge. So now it’s just going to be called Lorelei and Dorothy. It’s about what the two girls from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes would do in a world when diamonds are worthless, millionaires have lost all their money and the only way to survive is to head to a lifeboat state and hope for the best. That’s right: ‘Dry land is a girl’s best friend.’
The lyric is better than that makes it sound, promise.
Andrew
