During the 1930s a small group of
Polish poets, associated with Czeslaw Milosz, became known as the Catastrophist
school of poets. Aleksander Fiut explained in World Literature Today –
"the
inevitable annihilation of the highest values, especially the values essential
to a given cultural system. . . . But it proclaims . . . only the annihilation
of certain values, not values in general, and the destruction of a certain
historical formation, but not of all mankind,"
Terrence Des Pres, writing in the
Nation, states –
"political
catastrophe has defined the nature of our . . . [age], and the result—the
collision of personal and public realms—has produced a new kind of writer.
Czeslaw Milosz is the perfect example. In exile from a world which no longer
exists,... , Milosz deals in his poetry with the central issues of our time:
the impact of history upon moral being, the search for ways to survive
spiritual ruin in a ruined world."
The "central issues" of
the time of the Catastrophist poets were the political and philosophical
upheavals leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War
and the writings of this group of poets ominously foreshadowed the horrors of
that conflict. The world was dealing with the repercussions of the Great
Depression - mass unemployment and social deprivation, the rise of extreme
national political movements and authoritarian governments. The Catastrophist
school of poetry was a reaction to a growing sense of global anxiety and fear
for the future.
The central issues of our age are
many and varied. We seem to be living in an age of crises - economic meldtdown,
over population, climate change, water shortages, food shortages, peak oil and
peak everything else, species extinction - the list just seems to keep
growing...
During the Cold War we all lived
with the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. The likelihood of the
Mutually Assured Destruction of an all-out thermonuclear exchange may have
subsided but many other potential catastrophes are waiting in the wings. A new
antibiotic resistant superbug released by accident or by design could unleash a
catastrophic pandemic to ravage the world population. Recent erratic
oscillations of the global climate system could precipitate an abrupt climatic
shift into a new northern hemisphere ice age or runaway global warming.
UG99 black stem rust striking major wheat producing regions, extinction of the
honey bee through Colony Collapse Disorder or the general increase in extreme
weather events could cause a dramatic drop-off in global food production
leading to mass starvation, famine and general chaos and anarchy. The current
plateau of oil production could at any time begin the inexorable slide down the
back slope of Hubbert’s Peak leading to an ever increasing shortfall between
supply and demand in turn leading to global recession and poverty, falling food
production and famine and increasing political unrest and resource wars. Then
of course there are Nature’s wild cards - Mt Everest sized asteroids like the
one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, super volcanoes like Mt Toba
which took out 90% of the human population 70,000 years ago, Coronal Mass
Ejections from our sun like the 1859 event which scientists believe was
powerful enough to wipe out our satellite network and fry the global
electricity grid plunging the world into a darkness from which we may never
recover.
We are in a new era of Catastrophism.
‘The End of the World As We Know
It’ does not have to mean the end of us as a species. We are living in a house
of cards. If you take out a card, whether that be the oil card, the food card,
the electricity card or the economy
card, the result is likely to be the same. The whole precarious construct will
come crashing down around us and the survivors will wake to a very different
world.
The planet does NOT need saving,
it has taken care of itself for billions of years and will continue to long
after we fade into history.
What we need to save is us...
from ourselves.
The only question is; do we
deserve it...?
