Encounters at the End of the World: Is the World Ending?

I haven't posted for a while. I'm sorry. I've been gorging on turkey, cookies and chocolate - and feel rightfully fat and sassy about it. I won't bore you with a play by play of my Christmas vacation. Rather, I wanted to talk about something that's been making me think over the break.

Encounters at the End of the World.

A kooky film my dad picked up about the Antartic (because it was in blue ray I imagine) but that ended up being so much more than a documentary (errr or maybe didn't end up being a documentary at all...).

I thought it was going to be a documentary on Antartica and the conditions there, penguins, blah blah blah. In fact, it seemed more of an exploration of the kind of scientific work going on there, and the scientists doing that work... basically how the movie is kooky, since I guess it's kind of a prerequisite to be a little nuts to live there all year long...

Here's a little excerpt from a site that sums that part up pretty well:

"The most interesting part of the show is Herzog's interviews with various camp personnel, who share tendencies toward spirituality or extreme adventurism. The solitude amplifies their sense of inner harmony. One plumbing contractor has oddly proportioned fingers that identify him as a descendant of Aztec royalty. A construction worker imparts his clear-cut philosophy to Herzog. A biologist likes to show his crew apocalyptic science fiction movies, prompting Herzog to pursue a speech about the likelihood that man will soon make himself extinct. Although Global Warming is mentioned, Herzog does not make the subject into a main issue. "

http://www.film.com/movies/encounters-the-end-of-world/story/dvd-encounters-end-of-world/24762522

Here's where my rumination comes in: during one of the interviews, Herzog talks with an iceberg geologist (Douglas MacAyeal?) who discusses the recent movement he's been noticing of icebergs over the course of the last few years (?) because of global warming. He points to a little blip on the screen - no big deal, an iceberg the size of Ireland, so what? And says, "It'll be really interesting when this baby starts moving North...".

What is that supposed to mean?!?!?!

None of the scientists in Herzog's movie denied global warming - how could they, they're witnessing its effects first hand. Everyone talks about the polar ice caps melting, yet it's hard to grasp that idea, like its some kind of Apocalyptical cant. But if little BLIPS on his screen of ice are the size of IRELAND, and are breaking off and melting as they move up North? Suddenly being swallowed by the ocean becomes something of an eventuality (I'm talking hundreds, if not thousands of years people, so don't go buying Waterworld on blue ray just yet...).

And you know what? That thought is oddly comforting to me. This is what it must feel like to believe in God. I know that whatever damage we have done as a race, whatever species we have pushed and jostled into extinction, whatever lakes and oceans we have sullied and trees and forests we have cut and burned.... One day there will be peace. One day, the planet will take back what we have considered "ours" for so long (insert floods-of-biblical-proportions-mass-death-and-extinction-of-all-humans-plants-and-animals here) and start all over again.

It IS kind of like giving up. But for the girl who used to cut up National Geographics at the age of 5 and paste pictures of tigers and pandas and giraffes in a binder to preserve their memory in the case of their imminent extinction, it's a relief. Maybe we won't succeed our losing battle against global warming, pollution and over crowding. Maybe we can't. But I'm glad knowing that at least, even if everything goes to hell because of our stubborn egoism, that Nature will start again. It will take hundreds of thousands of years, but at least LIFE will go on, even if it isn't ours.

Makes you think, doesn't it. Where did they get the idea of Noah's Ark in the bible, when they didn't even know about polar ice caps and global warming? In all likeliness those men that wrote the bible hadn't even been 100 miles from the town they were born in. How could they have come up with such things? Maybe all that talk of floods and pestilence wasn't describing the past... maybe they were writing of the future.