The gods look on aghast, as human calamity unfolds…

Nov 22, 2024
Mighty god Zeus. The power of king of Olympic gods is the ability to throw lightning bolts. Fragment of an ancient statue. Horizontal image.

From atop Mount Olympus, Zeus peers in perplexity through fumes of fire, dust and vehicle exhaust, toxic chemicals, roiling tempests and raging floods, idly wondering what those darned mortals are up to now…

First his eye is drawn to ancient Media, part of old Persia (now known under its modern name of Azerbaijan). Here a conspiracy is unfolding as 1770 oil magnates work out how best to enrich themselves while killing off everybody else – man, woman and child – and turn the planet into a charred, uninhabitable cinder as swiftly as possible.

He  glances over the rubble of Palestine, where a 3000 year-old land-grab led by a certain Joshua rages on, despite countless attempts to pacify the participants. Not much new, here. Except the whole region has been stripped bare of the cedar forests and bountiful grasslands that cloaked it in antiquity, and is now pretty much desert. With shell-pocked skyscrapers.

The devastation is universal, it seems. If far-off Asia the last sad, orangs have been evicted by  human lust for potatoes fried in palm oil and for toxic cosmetics to adorn empty faces. Here, and in the Congo and Amazonia, the last of the great tropical forests are going up in smoke to the accompanying roar of bulldozers and the stampede of hamburger on six billion hoofs. Three quarters of the Earth’s large animals have been wiped out in barely two generations.

In India, Europe and China the last insects are vanishing as millions of tonnes of poisons are spread to preserve the  delicate cotton plants needed to assuage the global lust for blue jeans and T-shirts, whose owners will shortly cast them aside. Each year 2000 more poisons are added to the man-made arsenal of 350,000 chemicals, now claiming 14 million lives a year.

Half the countries on the planet, Zeus notes, are facing a water crisis. There simply isn’t enough of the stuff left to drink, irrigate their cities and grow their food. Drought is withering the crops from Central Africa to the USA, from the Middle East to Argentina and Chile, South Asia to China. Everywhere, rivers run turbidly brown, dying from a surfeit of sewage, toxic chemicals and over extraction. Underground, artesian water quietly dwindles – and wells run dry.

His eye strays to the war-rooms and missile labs, where white-clad boffins slave day and night to stuff the world’s 12,000 nuclear warheads into killer drones and AI robots, that think for themselves, the better to vaporise millions of innocent people without risking cyber warrior’s lives. ‘Whatever happened to thunderbolts?’ Zeus wonders.

An especially sinister sect is engineering ultra-lethal new plagues – as if the nature hadn’t supplied enough to start with. Meanwhile humans pack megacities, throng airliners, cruise ships, sports arenas, night clubs and child-minding centres, shun vaccines and cast aside their masks so as to spread death more efficiently among their  fellow citizens.

From the dwindling snows of Mount Olympus his gaze strays to the gleaming expanse of ice that caps the Planet’s poles. Before his very eyes it is dissolving away, fragmenting, running to the seas whose waters rise, inch by inch, whose currents waver and fail and whose rising heat whips up tempests of a wrath far outmatching those of the thunder gods. He shakes his Jovian head. His scowl deepens.

Zeus shudders as humans, inflamed by the ineptitude of their rulers, choose rulers more vain, incompetent and malignant still, who will only hasten the ruin and increase the suffering. These inundate their citizens with floods of lies, deceits and corruptions in their attempts to win and cling to power – while turning a blind eye to the very problems they were appointed to cure.

He watches on aghast as, each passing year, 80 million more people are crammed into the sinking lifeboat Earth. Here, rather than row to safety, they waste precious time arguing who should pull which oar.  Many pretend there is nothing wrong – and refuse to row at all. He shakes his immortal head.

There has been no shortage of Cassandras, sent forth by the gods to bear the unwelcome (and unheeded) yet truthful messages of warning, Zeus reflects.

“There is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation” warns Professor Hans Schellnhuber of Germany’s Potsdam Institute adding that, at +4 degrees probably fewer than one human in ten will survive.

Image: Supplied

“We are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse of civilisation,” added the late Australian climate warrior, Prof. Will Steffen.

“If we continue on our current path, we will face the collapse of everything that gives us our security: food production, access to fresh water, habitable ambient temperature and ocean food chains,” cautioned British science reporter David Attenborough.

“We are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption,” states one of the earliest prophets, American planetary scientist James Hansen.

“Collapse of civilisation is a near certainty within decades’,”  US extinction biologist Paul Ehrlich told the Guardian.

“When risk is analysed according to the nine planetary boundaries… (they) show a dangerous tendency for the world to move towards a global collapse scenario,” said the UN report on Disaster Risk Reduction.

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperilled,” said Prof. William Ripple and colleagues in their 2024 report on the State of the Earth’s Climate.

Like the Trojan priestess Cassandra, whose prophetic warnings of the sack of Troy and the deaths of the Greek chieftains were cursed by Apollo to be ignored, Zeus reflects, these modern prophets – whose words are backed by solid proofs – have been shunned by a civilisation bent on its own obliteration.

As the apocalypse draws nearer, the tragedies proliferate. People seek empty distractions and entertainments to ignore the Fates now bearing down upon them. Parents choose comfort over seeing their children survive. The leaders take refuge in falsehood and self-worship. The rich pile up imaginary wealth that will shortly vanish like soap bubbles in the sun.

Old Zeus has seen it all before. 80 civilisations have come and gone since he first began his vigil.

“They never learn, do they?” he reflects.

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