And the World is Ending.

There's a term that the ancients used often. Hubris. I love that word. Somewhere along the way, after Constantine and his boys saddled us with monotheism, they essentially replaced it with the simple-minded word 'sin', which isn't really anything at all like hubris and in fact muddies the water so much that hubris sank and pretty much vanished from the popular psyche.

Which, I suppose, was part of the plan.

Mention the term to your average shmoe and you'll get a blank stare. And that's a shame, since your average shmoe is awash in it; is, in fact, drowning in it. Quite actually drowning.

Most people seem to while away their days sitting in a bathtub full of pop culture execrate. I'm not being too judgmental here, because I once did the same. Maybe not to the extremes as most other people, but I must admit that I had my own love affair with vacuous music, literature, art, and what passes as theater in the form of television and movies. (But no midget versions of the Great White Way down here in the small towns of the southern USA.)

However, I stopped watching our pop culture delivering a false message of immortality some time back. Now, I look for what the more religious among us call signs and portents. In their cases they're searching for indications that the anti-Christ is coming, that Armageddon is looming, that the Bible-defined end is nigh. Frankly, I can dig their attitude, even if my own curiosity for the end times comes from more technical locations and emanating out of sociological sources and not prophetic texts featuring Moses and his progeny.

I see humanity's termination coming in other ways. There is the inexorable march of extinction as our fellow travelers on this spinning globe vanish into the black hole we have dug for them, thinking that by filling it with all of those sacred creatures we are somehow hiding the fact that we have, in all actuality, carved out our own final resting place. We're just tossing our animal buddies in the tomb preceding us so that we won't go alone, as if we're some kind of multi-headed pharaoh. Every few days the news is there. Some other wonderful animal that has tread the planet for millions of years is no more. Maybe it's a precious species of rhinoceros. Or a type of gazelle. Or maybe some long-skulled gavial, or a blind dolphin that used to ply the muddy depths of a silt-laden river eating a shrinking population of fish.

Those who walk about with their cloak of hubris don't see it. Feh. Some stupid critters went out of style. Who cares? Humans will go on without that fucking rhino as if it had never existed. Or so they think. They're so wrong. They don't know how wrong they are, but that doesn't prevent them from being so very, very wrong.

I don't mention the web of life to these people. There it goes, another strand missing, the weight of Homo sapiens hanging onto the weakening filaments that bind what remains cohesively. I can see the anchors straining away, trying to hold up our collected mass of almost eight billion naked asses extruding shit as we eat every goddamned thing we can grab.

Hell, we even consume the crust of the planet, gouging it out, pouring it into the seas, despoiling the aquifers that we need for fresh freaking water.

Hubris. Frack that bitch. Get that oil. Draw out those metric gigatons of natural gas.

Sociologically, we are a horrid mess. I have watched as even the edges of our popular culture have withered and curled and become desiccated waste that is about to go up in flames. And no one cares because that very culture is throwaway and was intended as such and has already been tossed aside for the next big thing. The beauties of older days are forgotten and been rejected for the latest and greatest pussy du jour.

I recall times when bookstores were a given. If you lived in a town of even modest size there was a bookstore where you could go and shop. Yes, it was likely to be packed with insipid romance novels and silly potboilers and goofy fantasies. But there were always good books mixed in with the escapist fare where one could find them. And in the smaller towns you had libraries. Even in the tiny burgs where I sometimes lived I could go to a library and while away the day searching through books of geology and history, fiction and fact.

But now bookstores are fading. Even the vast factory chains that were supported by investors pouring billions of dollars into those brick and mortar walls are going away, company by company, chain by chain, location by location. Poof. Mr. Hubris grins stupidly. The stellar constant stares into the knowing void while we yammer away, thinking ourselves as persistent as being. Alas, nope.

If you'd told me when I was a kid wandering around the shelves of my parents' bookstores that there would be a time when finding even a used bookstore would be difficult, I'd have laughed at you. Are you loony? You should be bouncing around a cartoon cel with Daffy Duck!

A few days ago I saw that Mad Magazine is effectively ceasing publication. Once the most successful magazine on the planet, it was closing up shop. Yes, it always was a crass, crude, working class kind of silly pop culture. Why should I mourn its passing? I suppose I could spend tens of thousands of words educating you as to why it bothers me, but then I'd be as guilty of hubris as those who never saw that coming. So I'll boil it down for you:

It was, to a couple or three generations of US citizens a constant. It was always there, on the newsstands. Alfred E. Neuman staring out at you with that misshapen ginger face. Mad Magazine for all of its crude sensibilities had spawned an occasional blip of brilliance. Harvey Kurtzman created it. Wally Wood gloried in it. Don Martin swam through the pages. William Gaines profited from that glorious thing like crazy.

It was everywhere and permeated US society without really advertising itself. It was self-evident and mildly subversive. It may not have spawned revolution, but it presaged its coming. In a nutshell, it taught kids and overgrown adolescents that grownups and society lie to us constantly. And in that simple lesson it thrived and was--as I said--everywhere.

Well, until now. Now, it is gone.

Bill Gaines probably saw it coming when he emptied all of those mint condition back issue EC comics from his storage bins. When he sold off every page of original art that he'd ever published. (Yeah, he kept all of that art, that forward thinking capitalist bastard!) I think he saw it coming when he foisted off the magazine upon a corporate behemoth and shuffled his own fat ass into retirement, chuckling gloriously all the way to the bank, maybe not thinking too much of Harvey Kurtzman as he fled this mortal coil.

What does Mad Magazine have to do with mass extinction and the coming end of Homo sapiens? Frankly, I'm not sure myself, except that one got me to thinking about the other. And of that musty, ancient idea that those instigators of western thought came to term as hubris.

A world without Mad Magazine? A society that doesn't even know who Alfred E. Neuman is? You must be daft!

Our own existence is pop culture. Homo sapiens is just Earth's latest fad. We're the trilobite frozen in shale, the dinosaur locked in stone, the rotting mammoth carcass being vomited out of the melting permafrost.

Someday--and it will be soon--we'll follow Mad Magazine and that rare type of rhino down into the sucking black hole where existence ends. We won't terraform Mars and flee to that dead, toxic ball of frozen rock. We're not going to build starships and travel the galaxy. To paraphrase a certain pop-culture villain, the Universe expects us to die, Mr. Bond; and that's an expectation that will be fulfilled.

Hubris, or not, we're goin' down.

Don't say we weren't warned.

Alas

Over the past couple of decades one of my favorite authors was Charles Bukowski. It wasn't just his ability to articulate his life as an overtly worthless bum in his brilliant prose and poetry. I also had a grudging admiration for his ability to not give a damn about humanity. It's refreshing to encounter a person who, on the one hand, has no faith in humanity, but on the other hand does not give in to praise of the status quo. That was, I think, what I liked most about his collective work.

There is much to be said in favor of that ideal. That being of not giving, as my father would have said, a good goddamn about human society.

Giving a damn is pointless. Nothing good is going to come of the industry of people.

I almost don't even want to bother talking about us anymore. The people who do are regarded as strange and just shoved aside. Alarmists, they call us. I think of Rachel Carson. Or (so that none of you think that I'm comparing myself to Rachel Carson), any of the thousands of people who worry about the world becoming a slag heap.

There are people out there who actually get their hands dirty trying to keep this from happening. They toil endlessly trying to stop corporations from turning forests into bare hillsides, from tearing down mountains and making them into open pits, from transforming clear watersheds into foul sumps. I talk to them. They are mainly positive young people who think that they are going to win. That the little victories their groups (they all work for some kind of group, whether public or private) tally will add up to the preservation of Mother Earth.

But after almost 60 years of watching...I can assure you that Mother Nature has been raped beyond all hope of saving. She is, as that German word so perfectly delineates, kaput.

There's no saving Her, or us, now. We passed the point of no return some time back. And, of course, no one really cares. People who are stupid are led around by an imaginary struggle between left and right. These idiots only care about their air conditioning and their tablet computers. People who are relatively intelligent tend to think that there is still some hope left, and I sympathize with them.

Because there's not.

The Earth is burning up around us and everyone acts as if this is all normal. Every day things that have existed on Earth for millions of years are made extinct by our actions. No one will do anything to stop this. No one can, really.

There is a solution to the big problem, but it would involve--unfortunately--tremendous bloodshed and tremendous power. And the folk who are in control are in control so utterly and so completely that this will never happen.

Bukowski had us pegged. We're going to continue along the path we're on. We're just going to walk the Earth destroying everything until the ecosystems that birthed us and sustained us collapse completely. We'll follow the creatures we have destroyed into that black hole of Oblivion and there is no stopping it. Hell...there's not even going to be a pause in that crazy march beyond the event horizon.

Unlike Bukowski, though, I don't plan to sit in a room typing out misanthropic poetry. I will, as I've done the past couple of decades, plunge into what's left of our wild places and see them before they're all killed off.

As surely they will be.

Mountaintop removal mine in Letcher County, Kentucky. Where enriching billionaires takes a back seat to...everything else.

It Will Happen Here

Carole took this one of me and Andy at Mammoth Hot Springs. Not too many years ago energy companies wanted to tap the thermal aquifer beneath Yellowstone National Park to run steam turbines to create electricity. This would effectively have destroyed most, if not all, of the thermal features in the park.

Until I get a chance to go back west and visit Yellowstone and other National Parks in those amazing places, I'll be poring over the photos we took and reliving those memories. For years I have realized that our remaining wild lands are existing on the verge of destruction. It's only a matter of time--and I'm convinced short time--until they're all either outright destroyed or ruined beyond only the application of peace and time to restore.

And, of course, restored only in the absence of Mankind.

Looking at our parks and wilderness areas, reduced to relatively small patches of territory around the Earth, I can see now that saving it all is an impossibility and that the final destruction of our remaining ecosystems and the living things who dwell within them is a lost cause. For these artificial boundaries that we set up to indicate a park or national forest or protected wilderness are ephemeral and easily destroyed through the same legislative acts that created these tenuous boundaries.

To see what can and will happen one has only to look to recent history in places like Rwanda and the Sudan. There, National Park boundaries were ignored and overrun by desperate people displaced by poverty and warfare. In short order they became wastelands where animals were nothing but food for the raving hoards of weapon-carrying humans and the forests were felled for fuel and housing, the waters fouled. So much for parks.

Think it can't happen here? It can, and will. Already I read of timber poachers who creep into National Parks to surreptitiously fell old growth trees in the absence of rangers. We can't afford rangers, you see, and there are more than enough desperate assholes in the USA willing to rape their own parks to cut down ancient hardwoods to sell for enough money to buy a big screen TV. Bears are shot for body parts to sell to rich Asians who believe in old superstitions that instruct them that consuming such things will increase their potency and likelihood of conceiving a male heir.

Even in Yellowstone, which showed me the power of Nature, the park is constantly under threat. Land owners and gun rights madders are whipped into a frenzy of insanity over the existence of wolves and bison which they see as threats. These idiots don't understand that they're being used by energy and real estate interests to weaken laws and regulations that protect these creatures. Without those protections rich men can become even richer mining the earth and mowing down the forests and building atop the places that now serve as home for the creatures that are just in the way of their profits.

Our parks are doomed. Our forests will be cut. Our rivers will be fouled. Our fellow creatures will be exterminated. All of this will be done for money.

And the only thing one can really do for it is to see it all before it's gone. So if you want to witness an unspoiled mountain vista free of urban sprawl, then I suggest you get yourself to such a place and hike into it with all due speed. If you want to see a free-roaming herd of bison living as they once did before Man arrived on the scene, then I think you should rush out to one of the few parks left that afford you this chance and lay your eyes upon it. If you hunger to walk through virgin forests of old growth trees then you'd best hurry up and do so, because between timber companies and invasive pests and climate change and mysterious diseases I fear we're going to see the end of such places in quick order.

Mother Nature does fine art with super-heated water and mineral deposition.

If these hot springs were ever tapped, they would be destroyed.

The ever-changing pools at the top of Mammoth Hot Springs.

Hot springs and mountain vistas.

One of the amazing roaring features we witnessed on our Yellowstone trip.

This huge buffalo was using a dust wallow on a steep slope above the valley.

It was the beginning of the rut and this bull was staking out this cow and warning everyone away. Later that same day, I watched a group of motor bikers pull up beside an enormous bull bison sitting in a wallow beside the road, walk up to him, surround the animal, as one of the idiots reached out to touch the almost one-ton buffalo. Humans can, and will, destroy everything that they can get their mitts on.

Telephoto shot of part of one of the enormous herds we watched in Hayden Valley.

A bit of the hundreds-strong herd in Hayden Valley. Once upon a time, the west was all like this for thousands and thousands of miles. We've destroyed 98% of it, but that apparently is not enough. That remaining 2% must, apparently, also go away.

View of 10,300-foot Mount Washburn, which I had climbed a day earlier. It has one building on it, and would, some would argue, be better off if it could be covered in subdivisions and gas stations. I am reminded of Highlands NC and the hideous sprawl of houses wrecking the slopes every time I look at an unspoiled mountain.