By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

There is a creature stalking the human race, a colossal ferocious beast with tentacles that lash every last corner of the globe, a pitiless monster the likes of which mankind has never encountered, and this thing is out for blood. Its methods are as brutal as they are efficient. Its weapons are as deadly as they are diverse. It will reduce entire villages to ash with blazing infernos and it will drown entire islands in the deep blue sea. It will erase ancient agrarian civilizations in the blink of an eye and engulf once fertile bioregions in billowing waves of towering sand dunes.

This thing is coming after our most precious resources. It’s targeting our food and our water and our children too. It’s pitting us against each other, tribe against tribe, race against race, nation against nation, watching us rip each other to bits just for its own sick sadistic pleasure. Some people swear that it doesn’t even exist, that it’s some kind of boogeyman too ghastly to possibly be real, but then it gets them too. Others have gathered vast armies and built sweeping industries to hunt it down and reign it in. But nothing seems to work. Our deadliest weapons and most advanced technologies seem totally impotent in the shadow of this colossus, and it only seems to grow more merciless by the hour. What have we done to deserve this fate; we beg in our final hour. The beast just laughs and reminds us that we know exactly what we’ve done and that this is exactly what we deserve for our sins.

This creature has many names, myths passed down through the ages between wisemen, poets and heretics. Armageddon. Kali Yuga. Judgement Day. Ozymandias. The Second Coming. The Decline of the West. Most know it today by the title of climate change and despite what some of my fellow libertarians may tell you, this is indeed a very real monster stalking the human race, but the human race is anything but an innocent victim. All of these colorful monikers and metaphors are really little more than elaborate ways for mankind to disassociate itself from the fact that this creature is just the planet itself, Mother Earth, and that deadly bitch is out to spill the blood of her own children because we have spent centuries violating and debasing her for our own carnal pleasures.

We have dumped 365 million tons of carbon dioxide into her atmosphere just so we can drive glorified tanks from our gated suburban plantations to bullshit office jobs in half-empty cities and another 180 million tons has been added to the heap just so we can mow down forests to expand the sprawl. All of this garbage, this commercial ejaculate, has changed the very composition of the atmosphere itself and rendered our oceans into bottomless pits of acid that promise to corrode every last coral reef by the end of the century.

Mother Earth is pissed, she is on a rampage, and as unpleasant as it may be to say out loud, we the species who have ravaged her probably deserve to die for our crimes. Climate change is a horror story alright, but if you’re looking for cinematic allegories to our current existential predicament, you’re going to have to look for something a little darker than your average monster movie or slasher flick. If climate change has a genre, then it is that of the much-reviled rape revenge picture.

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