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As an attention-getter, The End is Near is right up there with the fabled cry of “Fire” in a crowded theatre

As an attention-getter, The End is Near is right up there with the fabled cry of “Fire” in a crowded theatre. Identical really, as claiming the world is about to end any moment now is the loudest possible cry of “Fire” in the largest possible theatre of all. The call does gather a crowd. Under the spell of lunatic prophets belching Armageddon, people have done the craziest things — crowded on mountain tops or gone off into the torrid desert — to await the end, only, of course, in the end (that never happens) to be disappointed.

Its enchantment never fades. However often it proves hollow, there is always another set ready to take it up. (It’s like the Quebec referendum: if at first you don’t secede, try, try again. Sorry.) Summoning the shadow of universal doom has advanced many a fretful cause, spawned numerous sects, and wrought tribulation and anxiety in the minds of men since ancient times.

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Religious pretenders, in particular, have demonstrated a fondness for the imagery and idea of extinction and collapse and none quite so gluttonously as the modern sectarians of the environmental movement. They have been throwing out scares of population bombs, famine, extinction, wars, world floods, vast migrations and — the favourite — imminent and absolute global ecological collapse for decades now. It would take a master of the abacus to tot up how many “deadlines” and “last chances” and “tipping points” and “if-we-don’t-act-NOW-it-will-be-too lates” the world has been teased with, whether from Prince Charles on his private train, sundry ecological anchorites, or the pursed pious lips of the “we’re-here-to-save-you, send-in-your-money-now” megacorp fundraising machines of Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and all their green ilk.