Your Last Weekend

Since Your Last Weekend is nearly upon us I thought I'd take a moment to consider the End of The World.....no, not that end of the world, the one we've all been so busy contributing to for so many years here in the so-called First World. The biblical End of The World has been a....what? work in progress? for so long that we're starting to wonder about truth in labeling. What happened to May 27, 2012 anyway? Why the rush to judgement?? Courts have held that advertising is misleading if “members of the public are likely to be deceived". Well....yeah! How many believers have given away all their worldly possessions over the centuries only to find after the "Apocalypse" that they've suddenly experienced severe income disparity?

In any case, and no offense to any folks pouring over their bibles, calculator in hand, can we address the more OBVIOUS with regard to the world as we know it coming to an end? I'm surely not the first commentator to note that us humans are destroying the natural world around us, nor will I be the last (unless this REALLY is The Last Weekend, of course!). You don't need a bible to know that the Creation is in deep shit. Ever since the Industrial Revolution (such as it was) us two-leggeds have been about our business of treating the planet like some commodity and its inhabitants as slaves or worse, lunch. To justify this sort of behavior we've even developed economic theories that.....well, make no sense? Wasn't it the late eminent (and relatively sane) economist, Kenneth Boulding who stated: "Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist". Perhaps the best unheeded wake-up call to our disastrous situation here on Planet Earth came way back in 1992 with the publication of The World Scientists' Warning to Humanity in which "senior members of the world's scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated".

Even before that Earth shattering statement, Bill McKibben nailed his historic theses on the Climate Crisis, The End of Nature, to the proverbial church door. In the book he notes: "I believe that without recognizing it we have already stepped over the threshold of such a change; that we are at the end of nature." McKibben goes on to say he doesn't mean the end of the world, but to my mind it is a distinction without a difference. Oncoming climate disruption is pretty much guaranteed to fuck you up. The world may as well have ended when weather becomes synonymous with chaos, when food becomes truly scarce, when natural systems shutdown. Sorry, but that's endtimes in my view, not Four scary guys on horseback.

I'm looking for a pleasant way to close here so as not to spoil your...um...weekend? I'm thinking it might be a good time to hang out with old friends and heal any old family wounds, a good time to make love (it's always a good time to make love). Not just because there's even a slim chance that this might actually be Your Last Weekend, but because there's still an actual chance that we can forestall the End of Nature and leave our children and grandchildren some semblance of paradise.