This Is the Beginning of the Age of…Extinction

What the Orange Skies Over America Really Mean, or Why the World Is Coming Undone

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By now, you’ve seen them. Everyone’s seen them. The dystopian pictures of America’s East Coast, particularly Manhattan, under….that orange sky. That Extinction sky.

All this is just what your gut is telling you it is. Your brain is disputing it, because, well, sadly, your brain has been filled, if you’re the average person, with a series of Big Lies, half-truths, and rank disinformation. Your gut knows. It’s shouting at you. It’s saying, “hey, that looks Biblical! What the hell…there’s something very, very wrong here.” Meanwhile, the average person’s brain is busy trying to suppress that intuition, from the core of the deepest part of what it is to be human, with… “Hey! Chill! Think about…buying some…designer…sneakers! Sip that overpriced mocha-ccino-latte!! Hey, isn’t there yoga class tonight? Everything’s gonna be fine.”

Go ahead and join me in deranged laughter. Because….

All this is just what it appears to be. Hello, the sky is orange. You can smell Canada burning from Fifth Avenue…from Washington DC. Of course your gut is screaming out in alarm. That’s the only part left of most people that works anymore. What do you do when a fire so big its effect stretch across half a continent is on your doorstep? Shrug. Or run, like the devil himself was on your tail? The gut versus the brain. What’s a brain worth, anymore, anyways? Does the average person even have one? If they do, how come…nobody cares…about….

This is the Beginning of the Age of Extinction. It’s not a drill, it’s not a test, it’s not a joke. It is Biblical because it’s going to be. And yet the average person’s been taught to beat that very intuition into mewling submission. I know that sounds like a lot, but just wait, because we haven’t even gotten into it yet.

History is going to look back on the 2010s and 2020s as the Beginning of the Age of Extinction. Every year, things get more…sinister. That orange sky. It’s happened in Australia, over and over again, where they had a “Black Summer,” when the continent…burned. In San Francisco. Now in Manhattan. Meanwhile, over the last few years, the mega-scale impacts of climate change have arrived. A third of Pakistan — that’s a country of hundreds of millions of people — flooded, thanks to a mega-monsoon. Europe’s rivers are running dry, and every summer, its hotter parts burn. Let me simplify all that, because, well, you probably already know it. But do you really understand what’s happening here? Does anyone?

If I’d told you a decade ago that you’d be able to smell Canada burning from Fifth Avenue, which would be under an orange sky…would you have believed me? You’d have laughed at me. And yet here we are.

Nobody cares about Extinction. Nobody. We talked about that yesterday. Today, we had the laughable headline that phasing out fossil fuels isn’t even on the agenda at the big UN climate change conference. Go ahead, join me in deranged laughter.

Extinction is an event that we cannot comprehend. I don’t mean “ever,” but I do mean: not in this way. It’s an event at a) geological timescales, just the sixth one in billions of years b) at the scale of all life on the planet, which includes us c) at the scope of a dead planet, which, no, won’t “die” in the absolute sense, but will take millions of years, most likely, to regain some kind of new equilbrium.

We are not getting this. Let me translate that into plainer English for you. We now face at least between five decades and a century of this. But worse. Every single season. Year. All the forms of emergency I listed above, and their aftereffects. Economies failing. Inflation soaring. Polities fracturing. Fascists taking over in the chaos and fear. Societies disintegrating. Go ahead and tell me if human civilization can survive a biological extinction event.

Join me in deranged laughter. Because this isn’t sci-fi. I know it sounds like it, and I’m not doing my job well, because, well, that’s the case, so let me try again.

Extinction is an event so…big…that the only ways we really have to comprehend it so far in human history…are basically…myths. Legends. Biblical apocalypses. Stories of great floods and towering flames and walls of water. Of harvests failing, all at once, everywhere. Of rivers running dry. We human beings have only really imagined such things — at this scale, this scope, planetary, total, absolute, final — in that way, a cosmic way, an eschatological way. It’s the wrath of the gods, it’s the final judgment, it’s the hell that comes before heaven.

None of what we have — none of it — helps us comprehend Extinction. It’s too big. Too vast. Too huge. LOL, did you know that last night, none of the three American major news networks even mentioned climate change in their reports about…the Eastern US being blanketed by ash and smoke?