Childhood's End, the Apocalypse and COP 21

摘要

As the is written on Dec. 21, 2015, the Winter Solstice - the longest night of the year - thoughts turn as they have for peoples and cultures back to time immemorial to endings. A period in a life, changing jobs, even death are a part of a continuum. Humans have long thought about a permanent end for the collective existence of humankind. Many in faith communities associate these "end times" with terms such as Apocalypse and Judgement Day. Artists look at it often as a subject of despair and destruction such as Albrecht Duerer's famous woodcuts focusing on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or John Martin's The End of the World (aka The Great Day of His Wrath). Scientists tend to look backward to see forward and look at the five (or perhaps more) Global Extinction Events/ Mass Extinctions/Extinction Level Events (ELEs) to foresee that potential for our own fates. And creative writers imagine for their readers how it might be from the human perspective, e.g. "The Hollow Men" (1925) a poem by T. S. Eliot where he famously writes "This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper."