It’s getting hard these days to escape the signs of apocalypse. But it won’t be the pandemic (not this one, anyway) that spells our doom. It’ll be the climate crises, a disaster that’s not merely on its way—it’s already here. Rosecrans Baldwin embeds with the government agents and the doomsday experts preparing now for the plagues, and the panics, and the fast-approaching day when life on our warming planet finally falls apart.
If you’ve felt something weird lately, regarding the speed of time, hear me out. If you feel like you’re “having a week” every week. If the days feel both fast and long. If your mindset feels shrunk. If the future no longer feels wide open; if the future feels confined to walking distance. If your parents turn defensive during a teleconference, or you get defensive around your kids. If you become crazed with blame. If you worry you’ll never take that trip to France. If you alternate between high-function grappling and a fog of attentional fatigue, what I’ve taken to calling “apocalypse brain,” with symptoms that include weariness, interiority, and a desire to drain the liquor cabinet. If you’re thinking about getting pregnant. If you’re thinking about never getting pregnant. Simply, if you can’t shake a sense that this, all of this, will soon change fundamentally, or—fuck—is changing fundamentally, and that history, geologic time, is moving a little differently at present, even crumbling in on itself.
Well, you’re right.