Ten Years After: Earth Strikes Back

hurricane_matthew — Hurricane Matthew, coming for you.

A decade ago, I wrote about the myriad ways our planet would eventually refuse to put up with us.

Today, I look back, during a global lockdown, as a monstrous zoonotic dystopia borne from humanity’s ceaseless invasion of Earth ravages the so-called civilization outside my window.

From dead zones and rising tides, from deforestation dystopia to the methane apocalypse, from drought and desertification to envirogeees and the demographics of death itself, Mother Earth can mete out mass extinction in a cosmological eyeblink. Especially if we keep pushing her, and our luck.

And we are indeed pushing her, and our luck, way past the breaking point.

In the decade before and since I wrote my predictions — in a midnight fever, a new father warning of catastrophes to come — I have repeatedly investigated the climate crisis nightmares we have brought upon ourselves. And not just here at Morphizm but also Wired, Salon, The Nation, Civil Eats and more.

To what avail I do not yet know, as our brutal calculus nears its endgame. But I will indeed keep writing and warning and fighting, all the way to the end.

Check below for my list of horrors written ten years ago, and what has come after. And stay ready for investigations and visions of what is yet to visit us, as things fall apart and the center cannot hold.