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I am told that the world is coming to an end. With the end of the year 2012, they say, comes the conclusion of life on Earth as we know it. Anyone looking at the world from the outside at the moment would probably agree: natural disasters run rampant across the globe; conflict and famine are apparent throughout North Africa and the Middle East; enormous debt is predicted to cripple the economies of Europe and North America; Chinese and North Korean military activities become more and more suspicious: all the while, the temperature rises and the human population grows exponentially. While some have resigned themselves to the fact that the end is nigh, there have also been many proposed solutions to the ultimate disaster: stop using fossil fuels and revert to living without modern technology, become vegetarian, confess your sins to an omniscient deity and find religious salvation; the list continues. With historical evidence, scientific speculation, media coverage and individual opinion, there are countless sides to this story. I would like to try and explain mine.
As appealing and exciting as the notion might be for some, I do not believe that the world will end on December 21st, 2012. Why? There are plenty of reasons and I’ll start with the most simple. I don’t believe that human beings can predict the future. Especially not 5,125 years or so into the future, which is how long ago the Mesoamerican or Mayan calendar’s cycles began. Secondly, scholars maintain that the proposed date of the apocalypse was not particularly important to the Maya: surely, the end of the world would be important enough to note, unless the ancient Maya had terribly unusual priorities or something. Thirdly, as a believer in the science of climate change, I can’t pass off rising temperatures and a monstrous increase in natural disasters as a ‘sign of the times’ and nothing else. Our poor, old, old Earth has taken a fair beating with the takeover of mankind and I don’t really blame it for making a fuss! As for war and military conspiracy, I am no expert. I believe that war and violence are awful, but I also understand that war has been around since mammoths and cave paintings and that not everything can be solved with a cup of tea (as nice as that would be).
Whether it is ending or it isn’t, the world is the way it is today because of an almost infinite amount of factors. Although much of it is beyond the direct control of someone like me, I endeavour to do what I can to keep the peace and ‘save the planet’ in a small way. I recycle, shop at second-hand stores and wash my clothes in cold water, while trying my best to treat the people around me with the respect I’d like to be treated with myself … because, really, we only have one world in which to live.
