“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”

Mark Fisher

Climate change is so often described in this malignant language of disorder, hopelessness, or even apocalypse. Images of water turned to blood, soil to dust, and nature into a plague enter into our collective consciousness. Especially now, as some of the world's most "privileged" geographies are engulfed by record-breaking heatwaves, wildfires, floods, and droughts, the "it is too late" narrative is dispersed like a pollen storm. Off it goes…

These days, I find myself seeing something rather more clearly: why this narrative of an approaching apocalypse has become so deeply embedded in our televisions, seemingly well-meaning environmental campaigns, algorithms, movies and visual culture; what this narrative serves; and whom it serves.

Not Enough

Because if climate change is, as of now, an incoming apocalypse, what was it before ten years ago—when communities across the Global South were already living through crop failures, rising seas, forced displacement, and deadly heat? When tens of thousands of people lived through a hellscape; lost lands, families, livelihoods, and dignity. Was it not enough of an apocalypse then?

The difference is that only now has it begun to come crashing into places that imagined themselves to be so very insulated from their own histories, and their consequences. Only now, as heat shocks reach Mediterranean holiday towns, Alpine retreats, and crystal-clear neighborhoods that it is officially apocalypse season. What took us so long?

Let It Come

A trade is perhaps why it took so long for the apocalypse to land on the precious shores of Europe and North America. A trade between imagining alternatives and preserving capitalism. A trade so cruel, so stupid. A trade that would never last. A trade that sold the illusion that the apocalypse may come, (let it come) but the absolute power of the West will stand tall, like shiny statues in Trafalgar Square. And "we'll be okay".

Truth is the Apocalypse

The multiple futures where Earth lives on, where we live on equally and perhaps even happily, never reached the shores. Where there is music from the streams. Where everything is all soft and sweet. Where the Earth laughs out loud.

Now here they come, all those alternatives made ugly and lonely; all those lives mined and drained, all the noble and beautiful things emptied out for grains of money; they cut through the false promises of endless growth, endless worlds, and endless exceptionalism. Like a crazy tide—screaming, hissing, kicking—the world is breathing its truths out. That's the apocalypse.