For the Holidays, the End of The World as We Know It

December is the time for families, food, lights, and gift-giving, right?

Just as I’ve done for many years, I participated in dramatic readings of “A Christmas Carol” with actor friends at nursing homes and retirement centers, and helped serve hundreds of meals to low-income and homeless citizens at Temple Beth Israel synagogue on Christmas Day.

But my personal entertainment took an oddly apocalyptic turn in December. I don’t mean zombies and post-nuclear war battles, but actual, serious looks at Where We May Be Headed. This didn’t happen by conscious choice or design -- impulse decisions at the library and suggestions by friends in one of my book clubs set the stage -- but it’s odd how they all came together this month.

Carole and I had waited a while to get our hands on the first-season DVD set of True Detective from the library. Several weeks ago we raced through the episodes in barely a weekend. In the pilot, a monologue by Matthew McConnaughey’s character “Rust” Cohle includes the following passage:

I think human consciousness was a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist, by natural law. … I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming. Stop reproducing. Walk hand in hand into extinction … one last midnight … brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

Melodramatic language aside, I agree with the general sense of Cohle’s remarks. It seems pretty clear that human consciousness is a failed experiment, and, like the towering dinosaurs of the Cretaceous or the oversized mammals of the Mesozoic (the mammoth, and the giant sloth, armadillo, and wombat), this particular species will come to an end fairly soon, despite its very brief success with the innovation of consciousness.

I wouldn’t call it a “tragic misstep” or error, though. In a sense, evolution never makes mistakes, because the process inherently involves trial and error, and periodic wipings of the slate to start over.

Was it a mistake for evolution to fail to plan for a giant meteor strike such as the one that destroyed more than 75 percent of all species on the planet 66 million years ago (including all the land dinosaurs, most of the flighted dinosaurs, and every species of mammal larger than a cat)? Though that was perhaps the most dramatic of the five major extinction events we know of, it wasn’t the largest.

Number three, the Permian-Triassic extinction, also referred to as “the Great Dying,” occurred 251 million years ago and was much bigger. It was a global warming event that drove ocean temperatures up 18 degrees, filled the air and water with carbon and hydrogen sulfide, and turned the seas glassy purple as they released poisonous bubbles into the pale green sky. More than 90 percent of all Earthly species vanished, and it took more than 30 million years for vertebrates to return.

There were also the post-Ordovician die-off (450 million years ago, supercontinent Gondwana freezes); the late Devonian extinction (375 million years past, an explosion of land plants may have caused a plunge in available carbon dioxide and a consequent ice age -- the plants killed the animals!); and the Triassic-Jurassic event (200 million years, heavy ocean acidification due to unknown causes cleared the decks for the big dinosaurs to come).

These three mass extinctions removed between half and 70 percent of all animal species on the planet. For Cohle to call the imminent demise of Homo sapiens a “misstep” is to make the all-too-human error of attributing value or progress to the process of evolution. But evolution does not involve things getting “better” or more efficient over the long haul; it does so only in small, local contexts. Then conditions change, and what had been good and effective becomes a liability. That seems to have been the case with human consciousness. I give our species no more than another 200 years.

I came to this conclusion long ago, either while I was still in college or shortly after. Though the potential cause of our imminent demise has shifted over the decades (nuclear war? nuclear winter? vanished food resources? radiation poisoning from nuclear waste? other pollutants? climate change?), I have no doubt it’s coming.

A lot of evidence to support this turned up in a book I ran across on the new books shelf at the library in mid December -- The Sixth Extinction: an unnatural history by Elizabeth Kolbert. I didn’t know anything about her or the book, at the time. Turns out she’s a New Yorker staff writer who’s been writing about ecological issues for a long time. I have since learned that The Sixth Extinction was named one of the New York Times’s top ten nonfiction books of the year.

Despite the gloomy subject, much of the book is fascinating and even inspiring. Kolbert takes you to corners of the earth you never knew existed—tiny Castello Aragonese, 18 miles off the coast of Naples; One Tree Island, near the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef; the 17 tree preservation plots in Manú National Park, eastern Peru—where dedicated scientists are discovering, studying, and trying to protect new (to humans), surprising, and increasingly endangered species of plants and animals.

You read about the latest theories about the five previous major extinctions on Earth, as well as the evidence for the next one we are probably creating. She describes recent major die-offs of amphibians in Central and South America, bats in the U.S., and coral reefs in the Southern Pacific. She also mentions new branches of the primate-to-human family tree that have been discovered within the last decade.

At the same time as I was reading The Sixth Extinction, a member of one of my book discussion groups recommended a new novel called Station Eleven, by Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel. It opens with a veteran actor dying of a heart attack in the middle of the fourth act of a production of “King Lear” in Toronto, just as a mysterious virus that originated in European Georgia is spreading across the globe and will soon kill about 99 percent of the world’s human population.

From there, the story ranges backward in time for the stories of the actor, his three wives, a son, and other friends and associates; and forward to show how life has changed over the 20 years that followed the medical catastrophe. A caravan of musicians and actors travels from town to town along a circuit through what had been the state of Michigan, performing music and Shakespeare for the tiny communities that have gathered at former truck stops and airports. Threats come in the form of banditry and religious zealots.

The title “Station Eleven” refers to a short series of graphic novels that one of the actor’s wives composes and draws. They are described in some detail and turn out to play a crucial role in turns of the plot. Station Eleven is a highly readable and thought-provoking story, and it obviously raises questions about mortality -- personal and global.

T.S. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow Men” ends with a play on a children’s nursery rhyme that has echoed through the decades since:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Increasingly, I suspect life as we know it will end not with either, but a combination of both: lots of smaller bangs and a long, drawn-out whimper. Perhaps pollution, diminishing food, water, and fuel, and climbing ocean levels and climate temperatures will place increasing pressure on nations and individuals so that street violence and small wars will increase as well. I don’t want to die, period, but I think even more, I don’t want to be around when all that happens.

During our December book group meeting, I noticed our hostess had a copy of The Sixth Extinction on hand and I asked if she had read it. I don’t know if I could handle it emotionally, she said. Myself, I found it fascinating and inspiring, and like my own mortality, well worth contemplating rather than choosing to duck the issue.