As I was watching the local New York City news coverage of Hurricane Irene before “she” made landfall, I was struck, as I have often been before, by the pleasure of the apocalyptic that the newscasters were so obviously experiencing as they reported on the storm: Potentially the first hurricane to make landfall in New York since the Norfolk and Long Island hurricane of 1821! The storm of a generation! The storm of a century! And as weathermen and women conjured up the worst-case scenario and invited us viewers to contemplate what was in store for our beloved city, they grew increasingly giddy. We were told to expect pounding torrential rains and ferocious winds lasting as long as twenty hours straight since the storm was so slow moving; we were told to expect a dramatic surge of water—seven feet of flooding into Staten Island! more than five feet of flooding into lower Manhattan!—due to the timing of the high tide, the arrival of the storm, and the narrow physical dimensions of New York harbor. We were told that there would be uprooted trees, power outages, broken glass flying from skyscrapers, devastating flooding of the subways, with the city paralyzed after the storm passes, not to mention billions in losses due to all the destruction and what would be a massive clean-up, but also because Wall Street, inundated by flood waters, might very well be shut down for days. We were implored to ready our “go-bags,” to fill our bathtubs, to stock up on bottled water, canned food, “energy bars,” radios, flashlights, and batteries, and we were shown empty shelves at markets and drugstores to drive home the point about what awaited any complacent viewer who did not heed their warnings.

I didn’t for a minute feel any pleasure in entertaining the weather forecasters’ apocalyptic visions. Rather, during the frenzied media build-up, I found myself feeling a kind of perverse pleasure in telling just about anyone who would listen that the approaching storm was good training for the world we are about to enter due to global warming—rising oceans, flooding of coastal cities and towns, black-outs, food shortages, general pandemonium. As I offered my interpretation of the coming storm, I realized—with far less pleasure—that I had been inspired by one of George Orwell’s “London Letters” to the Partisan Review that he wrote regularly during World War II. I had read them years ago but could still recall Orwell informing his American readers that the many shortages and rationing of foods and goods that Londoners were forced to endure during the war would turn out to be good training for the inevitable hard times ahead when Britain became a socialist country following the war. As I was telling this to my husband, I began to have doubts about what Orwell actually said. Luckily, I had made xeroxes of the London letters that I found most striking and was able to locate them. Sure enough, in one that was published in the November-December 1942 issue of the Partisan Review, I found what I was looking for. Orwell did say that due to rationing,

We are growing gradually used to conditions that would once have seemed intolerable and getting to have less of the consumer mentality which both Socialists and capitalists did their best to inculcate in times of peace. Since the introduction of Socialism is almost certain to mean a drop in the standard of living during the first few years, perhaps this is just as well.

While I was looking for that particular letter, I happened upon another one (published in July-August 1942) that startled me with its relevance to our own particular moment. It again concerned the prospects of socialism in England, Orwell’s belief that “we are back to the ‘revolutionary situation’ which existed but was not utilized after Dunkirk.” I hadn’t heard the phrase “revolutionary situation” for a long time, though I knew it was once a key word in the vocabulary of Marxist intellectuals. Now, of course, the idea of a “revolutionary situation” is as foreign to most of us as the idea that socialism is possible, let alone desirable. But in the bleak summer of 1942, intellectuals as acute as Orwell were able to draw parallels between the crises in the British government’s legitimation brought about by wartime defeats and the chaotic period preceding the Bolshevik Revolution during World War I. Thus, Orwell observed that from the time of the forced mass evacuation at Dunkirk “until quite recently one’s thoughts necessarily moved in some such progression as this”:

We can’t win the war with our present social and economic structure.

The structure won’t change unless there is a rapid growth in popular consciousness.

The only thing that promotes this growth is military disasters.

One more disaster and we shall lose the war.

Orwell’s disturbing progression of thought, it occurred to me, was pertinent to today’s global financial crisis, as well as to the crisis that is upon us with global warming. In imagination, I substituted “current collapse in our financial system/environmental-ecological disasters” for “war” and I found unexpected parallels between our current situation and that earlier disaster-laden one:

We can’t get beyond the current collapse in our financial system/environmental-ecological disasters with our present social and economic structure.

The structure won’t change unless there is a rapid growth in popular consciousness.

The only thing that promotes this growth is financial/environmental-ecological disasters.

One more disaster in our financial system/environment and we shall lose our world as we know it.

The final point, however, did not quite ring true to me, since we keep having violent gyrations in the stock market worldwide and repeated ecological catastrophes brought on by our insatiable appetite for energy—I thought of the BP Oil spill in the gulf coast last summer and the core meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear reactors this year—and yet our world somehow continues to go on. At the same time I was struck by another possible conclusion to this train of thought: If the global economy were to recover and prosper and produce voracious—i.e., American-style—standards of consumption worldwide, the result would be the hastening of environmental/ecological disasters.