Okay, I admit it. I have a dark side…it doesn’t take much for me to start envisioning large scale disaster scenarios, man-made or natural alike.  I don’t know where it comes from, maybe being allowed to watch really violent movies from a young age or from reading a lot of science fiction.  Top this with a college education focused on economic geography and critical theory meant that I kissed any kind of naivite away along time ago.   So, the last few months with water rationing, global food shortages, soaring gas demand, midwest floods and recent earthquakes, I immediately start imagining impending doom and gloom.  Now that I can smell the fires of the last few weeks…I can smell the doom and gloom; and I know that it is much worse where live.

When I saw Mark Morford’s SF Gate column, I was amazed that this kind of thinking made it to the mainstream press, although Morford does tend to be darker than your average liberal.  This kind of mindset has its advantages; I am very prepared…my earthquake kit is stocked and my gas tank stays 1/2 full.

Ironically, I actually think that my apocalyptic thinking comes from a place of hope and optimism.  I have always had trouble reconciling my radical utopian ideals with the process that will actually get us out of the mess we are in and into something better.  I have often considered mass destruction, either man-made or a series of catastrophes driven by nature to be the most likely “solution” to the question.

Of course, environmental and social problems are not the same.  I think that inevitably, they do have a relationship and my assumption is that they drive each other.  I often wonder; how bad can things get?  Not to say that they are bad for me, personally…on the contrary, but I am one of the last people that would be a victim of a systemic breakdown.  The do seem bad around me and moreso, they seem on the verge of getting really bad.  I wonder if my view of the current status of the world is egotistical and due to the fact that I am a product of the uber-materialistic Regan era.  For those who are closer to the Great Depression or the Holocaust, do things look so bad? 

This is not to say that I want mass destruction.  If I see it as the most likely way to the end result that I want, do I have to want the event itself? I don’t think so.  I see many downsides to catastrophe, including the potential for a Malthusian population cut.  I also don’t see a utopian, radical future as the most likely end result to apocalyptic events, there are a lot of other options that would be very ugly and are much more likely.

On the other hand, movements of ecological change and social justice may be taking hold on a larger scale.  Sometimes I think they are, other times I believe that I am in a small bubble of the world in which they are.  Most of the time, I am not really sure that it matters.  At this point, maybe these changes are just band-aids that are keeping the status quo while we progressively march to in inevitable revolution.  At this point, maybe it is just too darn late.

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