Apocalyptic Planet

Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Ever-Ending Earth (2012) is a nonfiction book about science, the environment, and the constantly ending world. From Chile to Iowa to the Bering Sea, science writer Craig Childs travels the world to uncover the unstable nature of the planet. He goes behind the speculation and science fiction surrounding ideas of the apocalypse to examine the mini cataclysms, both natural and man-made, that may well herald much bigger, less survivable events. The world will live on—humankind may not.

The book starts with desertification. Childs and his friend Devin spend time observing the Mexican desert, finding the corpses of animals who expired from heat and dehydration, and looking for any signs of life remaining. He reflects on the other major deserts in the world, and how they were once tropical and lush, but once persistent drought sets in, the desert starts forming. Mismanagement of resources contributes to part of the problem, but drastic global warming is speeding up the process; by raising the temperatures of circumference air near the equator, droughts intensify and spread. Semiarid plains and grasslands in Africa are already beginning to see the changes and even the southwestern United States can expect to see increased desertification.

Global warming is a natural phenomenon. There have been times when the planet has had ice-free poles and higher seas. Such times are marked by high extinction rates that take millions of years to recover. Currently, equatorial glaciers are gone, and the ice shelves are melting, with pieces the size of cities breaking off. Childs travels to Chile with a film crew to make what he calls a save-the-world documentary, and along the way, he talks to locals who remember more ice. He also interviews a climate scientist who estimates that the planet has between 1,000 to 10,000 years of ice left, although Henry Pollack estimates that the seas could rise as much as a meter by the end of the century, which would displace approximately 100 million people.



Childs also looks at how civilizations end, in part because of geological or climate issues. Unwieldy populations lead to overstretching resources, unrest, and eventual ruin just as surely as climate changes do (droughts, famines, volcanoes, river-redirections, sea level rise, etc.). Moreover, the larger the population, the less it can respond quickly and intelligently to sudden change. Cities and infrastructure also become harder to maintain, leading to eventual collapse. Not only does Childs look at the long histories of the Hopi, Mayan, and Roman civilizations, he sees the same kind of decay happening in cities like Phoenix and New York.

He travels to Greenland because he wants to “witness the earth in its deep winter phase, the result of many thousands of years of hard winters and short summers.” He goes with a research team of climate scientists. When they arrive at their base camp, they find that the elements have taken over, and it takes the better part of a day to excavate it from the snow. He also reveals that while global warming is happening, the overall trend of the past few million years is cooling—which is no better for us than global warming. Cold air carries less moisture, which means more widespread drought and famine, and a cooling trend comes with deathly cold temperatures. Still, even as the planet heats up, it will inevitably cool down again. The question is, what happens to humans and everything else in the meantime?

In Iowa, Childs examines land that is a biological wasteland. Large-scale farming, with its applications of pesticides, herbicides, and genetic modification, has the unintended consequence of wiping out native plant, animal, and insect species in favor of giving crops the most space and resources in which to grow. Iowa is ground zero to a mass extinction event. Currently, many species still exist elsewhere or are displaced elsewhere, but considering the dwindling resources available for such flora and fauna, their loss is a slow, but inevitable process called extinction debt. Yet, Iowa is a microcosm of the overall environmental picture. Destruction of habitat worldwide contributes to the endangerment and loss of thousands of species.



In Hawaii, Childs explores volcanoes, particularly Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. For him, walking the volcanic fields of black, dried lava is akin to standing on the surface of the moon, or Mars, or a post-apocalyptic world wiped clean and ready to start over. Over the course of human history, volcanic eruptions have been known to cool the atmosphere temporarily and change weather patterns, leading to agricultural devastation. Similarly, so did the asteroid believed to cause the extinction of the dinosaurs.

In the last chapter, Childs and his friend JT hike through salt flats in South America. In the middle of all the salt, they find an oasis (mainly by following flamingos) that teems with unexpected life, microbes and algae that thrive in that environment. It is an unexpectedly hopeful discovery, and he writes, “Even here at the very end, the bald earth where my own kind has ceased to exist, there was still no end.” Where there is water, there is life; perhaps not complex organisms, but life, nevertheless.

Apocalyptic Planet won both the Orion Book Award and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. Childs’s writing style is funny, sharp, and almost lyrical. For a book about the end of the world, it is curiously both hopeful and resigned. The world is always ending, but it is always renewing itself as well, even if it takes mass extinction events and a few million years to manage it.