Four centuries ago, somebody starving in the drought-afflicted Elbe region in what is today the Czech Republic anonymously chiseled onto the stone of the receding river bank a warning. Here, along the river where one day American and Soviet troops would meet on their dual approach to Berlin, a graffito made by an unknown hand marks 1616 as the oldest year recorded on one particular “Hunger Stone,” for on that surface there is a memento mori which reads “Wenn du mich sicht, dann weine.”

In the summer of 2018, which at that point was among the hottest recorded, though that standard has been broken in every subsequent year, the Elbe once again receded to the point where observers could read that ominous missive—“If you see me, weep.”

That same summer, the United Nations released its latest iteration of the Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change. Authored by ninety-one scientists, representing forty countries and based on over six thousand peer-reviewed scientific studies, the conclusions of the commission are horrifying. According to Coral Davenport at The New York Times, the climatologists discovered that if “greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit” by 2040, radically earlier than had been thought, meaning that anyone reading this will bear witness to “inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty.”

In the summer of 2023, scientists writing in the journal Nature concluded that of the nine “planetary boundaries” which regulate the parameters of life on earth, including criteria such as biosphere integrity and ocean acidification, seven had already been crossed.

And so, rather than with the breaking of seals and the blowing of trumpets, apocalypse was announced as a footnote in a buried corporate report.

It’s estimated that, because of the mass burning of fossil fuels, the average temperature throughout the world rose a single degree Celsius during the nineteenth century. It rose another degree during the twentieth century and today that rate has increased in a feedback loop powered by the melting of Arctic tundra and the release of previously trapped methane gas alongside industrial carbon dioxide.

Physicist Joseph Fourier, writing in an 1837 edition of The American Journal of Science Arts, had already hypothesized that industrial exhaust “must produce variations in the mean temperature,” while in 1856 Eunice Newton Foote wrote in The American Journal of Science that an “atmosphere of . . . [carbon dioxide] would give to our earth a high temperature.”

If those were minority opinions then, and they by no means necessarily were, then it was definitely confirmed by 1977, when a climatologist named James Black reported that “there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide released from the burning of fossil fuels.” Black delivered that report before the management committee of EXXON, who purposefully buried those conclusions and continued to fund lobbyists, think tanks, and politicians who vociferously denied the reality of anthropogenic climate change. And so, rather than with the breaking of seals and the blowing of trumpets, apocalypse was announced as a footnote in a buried corporate report.

Climate change is a special case when considering the history of apocalypticism, both because inevitably the issues which it raises—civilizational collapse, biodome destruction, and perhaps human extinction—so obviously call to mind the same imagery and rhetoric, tropes and themes, of past end-times prophecies, but also because in this particular case the issue happens to be real. Comparable only to nuclear war, but arguably even dwarfing the long-term implications of that unthinkable possibility, climate change signals the culmination of apocalypse at human hands, the end of the world as rendered not by the supernatural means, but because of our economic system’s rapacious avarice.

Yet if apocalypticism is phrased in the rhetoric of visionary metaphor and symbol, then the current climate crisis is rendered in the language of arid climatology and geology, a distinction which makes a huge difference. Apocalypse as a concept is by necessity supernatural, so that, when discussing the cataclysmic implications of climate change, words like “degradation,” “catastrophe,” “decline,” and even “collapse” may be more literally appropriate.

However, for all of us living within this moment, that’s perhaps a distinction without a difference. After all, whether or not hell is real, murder surely is. “I can’t speak the language of science” writes the essayist Paul Kingsnorth in Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, “without a corresponding poetry.” Today our data may be unassailably empirical, but our emotions are very much apocalyptic.

Today our data may be unassailably empirical, but our emotions are very much apocalyptic.

Within two decades of this writing, massive hurricanes and wildfires will be the norm, coastal cities will be inundated and perhaps abandoned, the planet’s sixth great extinction will continue unabated. The social, cultural, and economic effects of climate change will be recorded not on hunger stones, but in pandemics, wars, famines, and genocides exacerbated by the effects of higher temperatures. Alterations to human behavior which might hasten the worst effects of climate change are technically possible, though the authors of the IGCR doubt such change is politically feasible, as it would require direct action on the part of the industrial economies of the world, something with “no documented historic precedent.”

Myles Allen of Oxford University explained that “we need to reverse emissions trends and turn the world economy on a dime” if we’re to stave off an ecological apocalypse which we now understand isn’t centuries in the future, but rather mere decades, if not years.

We already see the effects in the increasing ferocity of storms, the droughts not just in the developing world, but increasingly in North America and Europe as well, and in the wildfires, which have burnt their way across the west. As the world’s temperature rises we see an equivalent political slow burn, nations increasingly moving toward the delusional reactionary nationalisms as a means of punishing refugee populations often affected either directly by climate change or by the civil strife made possible by it, for as Mark Fishcetti describes the Syrian civil war in Scientific American, “Human-induced drying in many societies can push tensions over a threshold that provokes violent conflict.” Fischetti noted the propensity toward climate war only a few years before Russia, inspired by millennial dreams of restored greatness, invaded sovereign Ukraine, the agricultural bread basket of Europe.

Roy Scranton in We’re Doomed: Now What? writes that as the “gap between the future we’re entering and the future we once imagined grows ever wider, nihilism takes root in the shadow of our fear. . . . [Y]ou can see it in the pull to nationalism, sectarianism, war, and racial hatred.” This is the recently spoken of “polycrisis,” a political and social description of the preponderance of crises which humanity now faces, from climate change to reinvigorated pandemics, increased military bellicosity and economic stratification, many of which are existential threats.

Does this describe “apocalypse?” In one sense literally no, since even if the entire biome collapses, even if billions of humans perish in the coming century, populations of people will still survive, and “nature” certainly will, having faced any number of extinctions in the past.

Perhaps the question then becomes “How useful is the language of apocalypse, the imagery, the symbolism, the allegory?” Perhaps such language spurs people to action, though it seems to have had perilously little effect in that regard as concerns the behavior of the most consequential of decision-makers. By contrast, maybe such language engenders a sense of defeatism, a belief in the inevitability of collapse which is collectively paralyzing.

At the same time, such a transition as implied by the current crisis necessitates and implies a coming organizational shift in society, but that could either result in a hideous fascism or in something genuinely utopian. What’s worrying at this point in our history is that we have ample experience in being able to see the dragon, but perilously little in even being able to imagine the dove.

If a reading of this book demonstrates anything, it’s that every century has a contingent of people, both smaller and larger depending on circumstance, who are convinced that they’re living in the last days.

Right now we’re at an impasse—there is a new global, political, and spiritual reawakening from the activist movement Extinction Rebellion to Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si’ that attempts to imagine a more equitable future—but there are also the enthusiasms of the Lords of Capital, none more so than the confidence men of Silicon Valley, praying to Moloch’s final incarnation in the form of the techno-utopian singularity, their creed being nothing less than Faust’s injunction—“Am I a god? Light fills my mind.”

It’s not technology that’s the problem—it’s the doctrine that technology is more than a tool, that in fact we’re tools for it. If a reading of this book demonstrates anything, it’s that every century has a contingent of people, both smaller and larger depending on circumstance, who are convinced that they’re living in the last days. The metaphysical irony of our situation is that today we may actually be living in the last days, and it’s not a conclusion rendered through scriptural exegesis or dispensation charts but by simply examining the untenable amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

At the very outset of working on The Dove and The Dragon, I sat with my son after he’d fallen asleep on the last day of the year 2021 and I doom-scrolled through social media on my phone. There I came across an acutely disturbing and arresting image, later to be swallowed in the maw of the ever churning digital cacophony, as is the wont of our jaundiced age. It was taken earlier that New Year’s Eve night, a photo of a group of exhausted doctors in Colorado working in a Covid ward, all wearing personal protective equipment, looking out the window of their hospital at the entire horizon of the Rockies burning with an unprecedented winter wildfire inching ever closer to them.

The central economic, political, ethical, and spiritual question of the remainder of this century—no matter how much time we actually might have left—is how to prevent that apocalypse which we spent so many millennia frightened of, but which now seems so near to moving from myth to reality, like a line of fire moving swiftly across the mountains. If apocalypse has always appealed to the human need for narrative finality projected onto all of reality, the question is will there be another chapter, and another chapter, and another chapter, or rather if this is actually all that there shall be?

__________________________________

Reprinted with permission from The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse by Ed Simon copyright © 2025 Fortress Press.