Environmental Apocalypse

By: Theodore Kayser

The Guardian of London recently reported:

As tourists posed for selfies at St Mark’s Square on Wednesday evening, shop owners mopped the floors of their premises and cleared debris while assessing the cost of the damage caused by record high tides.
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“An apocalypse happened,” said Antonella Rossi, who owns a handmade jewellery shop under the portico that surrounds the square.

Image by Sarah Fuller, used with permission.

An apocalypse indeed. Defined as “an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale” or “the complete final destruction of the world” this apocalypse could be understood as both. But it is the greek origins of this word to which we will turn. Apokalupsis: to reveal, literally to uncover or unveil.

St Mark’s Square was submerged by more than one metre of water on Wednesday and the adjacent St Mark’s Basilica flooded for the sixth time in 1,200 years – but the fourth in the last two decades.

The scene is bleak, family. As I write, California for weeks has been in the headlines for devastating fires. While the Maria Fire burns in California, Puerto Rico has yet to recover from Hurricane Maria. Ave Maria, pray for us now.

Environmental upheaval is more and more common. Hundred-year storms are happening every other year; three-hundred-year floods every decade.

We have built in the past century formerly unthinkable marvels. We can split atoms for electricity. There is no river which can’t be dammed (or damned). Americans have $3 strawberries in the middle of winter, travel to the other side of the planet in hours (nuclear armed stealth bombers included!), and have their own individual automobiles (or 2 or 3). It all seems quite miraculous if you think about it.

But what is the progress we have made? The Word of God might ask, “Upon what foundations have we built?” The answers: Fossil fuels and a willingness to exploit the earth without end as we have exploited (and continue to exploit) so many we should call our family. 

Yes, this is an unveiling. It turns out this “cheap” power from fossil fuels will be our undoing! It gifts us with so many trinkets and conveniences, a seemingly endless supply. Like a people addicted, we say will quit them tomorrow. 

Or better yet, we tell ourselves that we won’t ever have to quit; technology will find us a substitute! Solar panels, electric cars, recycling! (No need to think about those less convenient of the “3 R”s: reducing and reusing.) We’d never need to consider how the heavy metals from indigenous lands got to the batteries of our e-vehicles.

The plagues of John’s Apocalypse are not unlike our own environmental destruction: Heat and fires? Got it! Dried up rivers? Check out the Colorado. Poisoned water? Oh yeah — check out the place where the Mississippi enters the Gulf of Mexico. Death of every animal on land and in the sea? Well, we haven’t totally annihilated all life on earth yet though we have recently launched the start of the sixth mass extinction.

I wouldn’t suggest that John on Patmos was predicting our moment specifically but I would suggest that he knew that empires grow grandiose on the destruction of the environment and the exploitation of people. I would not suggest America is the Babylon of John’s Apocalypse but it is definitely a rendition of it.

John’s Babylon was the Roman empire which saw its own environmental catastrophe. The Roman empire deforested the Italian peninsula on a massive scale for fuel and extractive agriculture and because of war. It wasn’t the first or last empire to face a depleted ecosystem, though. Others would see their collapse for similar reasons, such as soil depletion or loss of fauna.

With fossil fuels, however, we can destroy the earth around us so much faster.

The Revelation of John is skeptical of the very things Americans declare as progress, primary of which is material abundance. It is our insatiable desire for an endless supply of cheap consumer products that has gotten us here. 

Too many of us in the U.S.and the Global North live off of the exploitation of our neighbors around the corner and around the globe to great effect. This wealth comes at the cost of lives, the environment, and our own humanity. We must face the fact that to do nothing, to change nothing, is to continue on this path of environmental destruction. Things are so bad that even if we don’t make it worse we are already doomed. 
    
Is catastrophic climate change divine punishment for our sins? I don’t know, though it is hard to deny that we have committed many sins and seem intent to continue to do so. I have never been much for God as ‘divine punisher’ but rather for God as liberator. I believe that the good news is that liberation is possible; we can turn away from our systems of oppression and our illusions of limitless consumption.

What we need is conversion. Conversion of our economies, our systems, and, for some of us, our very ways of life. We should not forget this conversion will require atonement. Those countries and people who have grown opulent on fossil fuels will have to remunerate those whose lands we have destroyed, whose wealth has been plundered, and whose cultures have been decimated. It is the only way we can hope to live in peace.

John’s revelation of the new Jerusalem suggests a city rewilded. Rivers flow down main street, trees abound. Those who were killed by the empire of profit are remembered and celebrated. We must count those who die from catastrophic climate events among the number of martyrs past and future. Let us not forget why they died.

The God who is Love implores us to tear down these systems of death, to leave not one stone upon another, assuring us that we will not have to do it alone.

The fall of Babylon is cause for celebration. In heaven its fall is met with cries of joy. Only those of us who unfairly and unequally benefit from its plunder, its resource extraction, its exploitative labor, and its other unjust systems will weep and mourn the passing of the current arrangement.

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Theo Kayser

Born and raised in St. Louis, MO, Theo has been a Catholic Worker around the West Coast and Midwest for the past decade. He has regularly contributed to the Los Angeles CW's The Catholic Agitator as well as other Catholic Worker Publications. He prays daily for the strength to confront the powers and principalities; his aspiration is that his writing might shed some light on their nature.