An actual horror story is reaching its zenith around
us right now. It is a fearful, shocking, blood-curdling saga of environmental
cataclysm, species collapse and millions of agonizing human deaths from
pollution. The nightmare scenario which should give us all sleepless nights
this Halloween makes The Walking Dead
look like a fairy tale.
Unfortunately with the entirely unnecessary chaos of Brexit this side of the Atlantic and the fatal distraction of Trump on the other, two previously leading nations that should be playing for team planet right now are not.
An author question popped into my in-box on Goodreads
the other day. ‘Can you tell us a horror story in two lines?’ Micro horror has
been fashionable for a while and I am impressed to see that there is a plethora
of well written and inventive writing boiled down to this even more minute scale.
However, when I tried to think of something
genuinely frightening – what came to mind was the German scientists’ report
last week of a 75% decrease in the winged insect population over the last two
and half decades. Apparently they were
initially alerted by motorists reporting the lack of dead insects on car
windscreens (yuk).
If you were a driver before the turn of the 21st
century, you will recall disgusting splattered windscreens when driving in the summer. Often, at the height of the summer, wipers
would become useless as the windscreen became a mess of insect gore. This
spawned jokes such as -
Q - “what is
the last thing that goes through a fly’s mind as he hits your windscreen?”
A – “his arse”.
Who has not noticed the absence of butterflies and bees in their gardens
or open spaces over the last decade? But apparently common sense and observation is not enough. I
remember the old tobacco industry arguments - there is no PROOF that cigarettes
cause lung cancer! No – just families with prematurely dead relatives.
Last week I bemoaned the nonsense of hugely
expensive inquiries – which often achieve nothing and tell us a fraction of
what was evident in this or that disaster. Might we hope that abundant scientific
evidence of our rush to self-annihilation will work differently? I hope so. If we
cannot look around us and just accept that the diesel fumes we can smell and
taste day long are killing us – then let’s at least believe the scientists who
inform us that diesel fumes are killing 1000 people a year in the UK. If we
cannot look around and shiver at the absence of those species, without which
the food chain we rely on will collapse and which we took for granted so few
years ago, let’s at least believe the scientists and statisticians. But however
we come to the increasingly obvious conclusions let’s for God’s sake and the survival of humanity DO
SOMETHING NOW.
We know the ice-caps are melting and weather
weirding has been caused by rising sea temperatures. WE KNOW. Further
acidification of our oceans harming popular fish such as cod was also announced
last week. Globally, scientists estimate pollution kills 9 million humans a
year. In some areas pollution deaths outstrip road accidents, smoking related
deaths and AIDs.
The ‘two sentences’ I contributed to Goodreads’ call
for miniature Halloween horror were, in fact, extracted from part II of my recently published epic
environmental poetry story Casey &the
Surfmen
Burning wind scorched the earth
which was barren and grey,
no sun arose, no new day,
no moon of silver and shimmering
white
consecrated the velvet night.
No sound but the scream of the mutilated
earth
and the howl of The One who was
there at its birth,
no noise but the weeping of babes in
the womb,
no laughing but the chuckles from
the tomb.
If you like your pending apocalypse in the form
of a dystopian sci-fi novella – try Zero
One Zero Two. Judging by recent reports, my only mistake with this last
piece was setting it too far in the future.