Cathy Smith

Fifty Years of Bickering at the Lip of the Anthropocene Volcano

They who have perceived the red-blue mirage on the horizon are done cheering on clowns promising water. They have watched the thermometers, looked at the pages of debt, and measured the ash. They have watched the world tilting towards populace doom as its two “great camps” bickered over who sported the moral halo the most convincingly. The general public looks at partisan mirages and salivates for the water that is only vapors on the horizon. The planet, the last one we will ever have, teeters on Anthropocene whist we argue over bathroom genders. The Earth dies as we argue over where to poop. Which color of politician “deserves” assassination. What we all deserve, in 2025, is a dead planet, devoid of all humans.

For five decades, the globe has slept in a circus tent pitched at the foot of Vesuvius. The volcano is there — carbon, nitrogen runoff, melting ice, dying ecosystems, antibiotic-resistant flesh-eating bacteria — but the crowd prefers the show. Every election season another routine: red clown, blue clown, pie in the face. Behind the guffaws, the ground shakes. The slogans grow thick with wildfire ash. Even the swamps are burning.

This article is not satire. Rather, it is a non-partisan balance sheet of reality, 1950–2025, a chronology of lost chances and declining priorities. Both sides share the blame. Their obsessions with wedge issues — flag-burning, bathroom bills — have become a bulwark against hard questions: How do you feed eight billion without permanently wrecking the biosphere? How do you power cities without burning the sky? Who pays the cleanup and rebuild when there is no safe harbor remaining? The West Coast hotels are filled with burnt-home climate refugees.

The solutions never materialized. We were instead given sound bites, hashtags, toxic social media and congressional hearings that felt more like reality TV. And so we remain at the gate of the volcano, still arguing about who is the better comedian between the red and blue clowns.

Timeline: 1950–2025 — Reality’s Ledger

Mirage Ischemic Stroke

The ledger is not partisan; it is planetary. The ground does not care who wins the next election. The ash will settle on every flag. History will not remember who “won” the bathroom bill fight — only that when the volcano called, both parties argued over the clowns’ makeup while the tent caught fire.

Here is a comprehensive bulleted chronology (1939–2025) of humanity’s many self-inflicted coffin nails — environmental, technological, military, and sociopolitical — all of which accelerate collapse or push us closer to a new Anthropocene-scale die-off. What people wearing red-blue 3-d glasses miss, distracted by Partisanship:

1939–1950s: Industrial Militarism & Ecological Ignition

• World War II (1939–1945) – mass industrialization of death, scorched earth tactics, deforestation, and early mass chemical weapons testing.
• Nuclear Age (1945) – atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; ushering in long-term radiation hazards and nuclear proliferation.
• Post-war industrial boom (late 1940s) – rise of consumerism, plastics, and mass production of fossil fuel–based goods.
• DDT and early pesticides – initial mass spraying campaigns poisoning ecosystems and thinning bird populations.
• Clear-cut logging – rainforest destruction accelerates as industry scales up timber extraction. Mahogany forests extinct in the wild. Some species only exist on private land.

1960s–1970s: Chemical Planet & Fossil Addiction

• Overfishing expansion (1960s onward) – factory trawlers devastate global fish stocks.
• Widespread pesticide/herbicide use (DDT, Agent Orange in Vietnam).
• Mass highway construction & suburbanization – locking society into oil dependence.
• First great coral bleaching episodes observed.
• Mercury poisoning (Minamata, 1950s–70s) – first global recognition of bioaccumulation in food chains.
• Green Revolution (1960s onward) – temporary food boom but fueled by fertilizer dependence, aquifer depletion, and monoculture.
• Nuclear weapons testing – fallout contamination of atmosphere and oceans.
• 1950: World population reached 2.5 billion, with roughly 400 million people undernourished and obesity largely limited to affluent nations.
• 1960: Population grew to 3 billion; hunger affected about 380 million, while obesity 

1980s: Globalization & Ecological Alarm Bells

• Chernobyl Disaster (1986) – radioactive contamination of Europe.
• Acid rain crisis – industrial SO₂ emissions devastate forests and lakes.
• Amazon slash-and-burn meat ranching intensifies.
• Plastic explosion – polyethylene and PVC saturate packaging and consumer goods.
• Early warnings about ozone hole (Montreal Protocol, 1987).
• Cold War nuclear overkill – peak stockpile of  >60,000 warheads.
• Corporate agribusiness expansion – wiping out small farmers and local biodiversity with Glyphosate.
• Population approached 4.4 billion, with 320–350 million starving and obesity climbing worldwide, especially in North America.

1990s: Neoliberal Growth & Climate Breakpoint

• Collapse of global cod fisheries (1992) – Grand Banks cod crash.
• Exponential palm oil deforestation in Indonesia and Malaysia.
• Ocean dead zones identified from fertilizer runoff (nitrogen, phosphorus).
• First IPCC climate reports (ignored politically and geopolitically).
• Ozone depletion peaks – Antarctic ozone hole largest on record (1990s).
• Gulf War oil fires (1991) – massive atmospheric pollution.
• Internet-driven consumer acceleration – e-commerce, packaging waste, electronics e-waste.
• World population reached 5.3 billion; hunger afflicted 800 million, while obesity surged past 200 million globally.

2000s: Tipping Points Accelerate

• 9/11 wars (2001 onward) – resource wars, ecological destruction, oil dependency entrenched.
• China’s coal surge – unprecedented CO₂ emissions growth.
• Mass extinction crisis recognized – amphibians vanish, biodiversity collapse.
• Genetically Modified Crops scale-up – monoculture dependency entrenched.
• Ocean acidification documented – reefs dissolve at alarming rates.
• Melting of Arctic sea ice (2007 record low) – feedback loop triggered.
• Hurricane Katrina (2005) – climate disasters begin destroying U.S. infrastructure.
• Population neared 6.1 billion; about 820 million remained undernourished, while over 300 million were obese.

2010s: Global Collapse Phase

• Fukushima Disaster (2011) – radioactive leakage into Pacific Ocean.
• Fracking boom – groundwater poisoning, methane leaks.
• Coral reef die-offs (2016–2017) – Great Barrier Reef devastation.
• Plastic in human bloodstreams discovered.
• Massive Amazon wildfires (2019) – rainforest tipping toward savanna.
• Climate refugee waves – Syria drought, Central American migration.
• Anthropocene confirmed – human activity surpasses geological forces.
• Digital panopticon expansion – surveillance capitalism entwined with ecological collapse.
• Population rose to 6.9 billion, with 900 million malnourished and 400+ million obese.

2020s: The Spiral Tightens

• COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2022) – zoonotic spillover, industrial meat farming implicated.
• Record wildfires across Australia, California, Siberia (2020–2021).
• Ocean microplastic saturation – detected from Mariana Trench to Mount Everest.
• Permafrost thaw releasing methane (Siberia, Canada).
• Record global heatwaves (2021–2024) – deadly wet-bulb temperatures in Asia.
• Glacier collapse events – Thwaites “Doomsday Glacier” destabilizing.
• AI and digital overconsumption – data centers emitting vast CO₂.
• Nuclear weapons modernization – new arms race (U.S., Russia, China).
• Global insect collapse – >70% declines in some regions.
• Soil degradation – UN warns 95% of soils could be degraded by 2050.
• 2025: Continuing mass coral reef collapse – reefs at functional extinction levels.
• Record inequality & oligarchic consolidation – dismantling social capacity to respond to crisis.
• Global population hit 7.8 billion; hunger impacted roughly 690 million, while over 650 million adults were obese.
• 2025 (est.): Population surpasses 8 billion, with persistent hunger in the 700 million range and obesity exceeding 700 million adults.

The Comet We Refuse to See

The dinosaurs never knew. The comet blew, and the world burned. Our comet goes more slowly, more purposefully, but no less firmly. It did not shriek from the skies. It began in furnaces and factories, in war machines and farm fields, in chemicals and plastic. Its first flash lit up the skies in 1939, when our species hitched the planet to the cause of world war and world industry. We've lived ever since not unaware of the comet, but in denial of it.

Every successive generation has been promised a different story: that salvation will come with progress, the market will relearn us, technology will disrupt nature. The politicians make the speeches, media cycles grind the catastrophe into spectacle, and incoming members of Congress briefly shriek the alarms before they master the art of dynasty-building beside the fountain of the Anthropocene they are poisoning themselves.

But the comet is real. It has been falling for nearly a century.

The First Shards of Fire: 1939–1950s

World War II was the first detonation. Not just in cities burned with atomic fire, but in forests cut down to fuel the war, in oceans sucked dry by submarines and factory ships, in the petroleum black rivers to fuel tanks and bombers. When Hiroshima illuminated the skies, we created a bomb that polluted the air and earth for centuries. When plastics streamed off the assembly lines, they brought convenience but planted the microfibers that will never biodegrade into the veins of fish, birds, and children.

That was the comet's initial punch to the planet. Its fist has not receded since.

The Long Burn: 1960s–1980s

By the 1960s, we knew. Pesticides that assassinated insects assassinated eagles and hawks too. The oceans groaned as factory trawlers keeled their bottoms. Agent Orange denuded Vietnamese jungles to earth. Suburbs asphalt-bedded cropland into desert, addicting whole nations to an oil habit they cannot kick.

By the 1980s, the coral was bleaching, the rain was acidic, and the Amazon was burning for cattle grassland. But the political class barely stirred. Some hearings, some reports, some symbolic treaties. They patted themselves on the back for closing the ozone hole while ignoring the wider divide below.

The Shattered Sky: 1990s–2000s

The tail of the comet grew stronger. Cod fisheries along the North Atlantic collapsed. Whole species disappeared before scientists could record them. Rainforests the size of countries were erased by palm oil estates. Fertilizer spills filled oceans previously considered limitless with dead zones.

However, the refrain continued to be the same: growth, growth, growth. Silicon Valley guaranteed that microchips and networks would transcend the physical domain, as all machines pulled out rare earths from the same exhausted earth. Politicians patted the unseen hand of the marketplace, with eyes averted from the blood and oil dripping from its fists.

The initial reports of climate walked onto newly varnished mahogany desks, read by aides, not heeded by decision-makers. The comet in the sky, yet authority's gaze is averted.

Full Impact: 2010s–2025

By the last decade, the strike was unmistakable. Fukushima was releasing radiation into the Pacific. Fracking was contaminating aquifers and farting methane into the air. The Great Barrier Reef was bleaching ghostly white. California, Australian, and Siberian wildfires were smearing the horizon blood-red.

Microplastics whir in the womb now. Insects fall silent in the fields. The Arctic seeps methane from melting permafrost. Rivers evaporate, glaciers collapse, and wet-bulb temperatures suffocate millions beneath heat the body cannot survive.

We're told to recycle. We're told to drive electric. We're told that the comet is something we can command, herd, deflect. But it is not control. It's green-dressed denial, a smokescreen while oligarchs tunnel in and novice politicians primp their verbal muscles before they, too, are dynasties from the poisoned fountain.

The Almost Hundred-Year Denial

It has been almost a century now that the descent of the comet began. One hundred years of bipartisan neglect, partisan denial, and across-the-board betrayal. The two parties knew. The two parties lied. The two parties pretended the Anthropocene would never end.

But the Anthropocene is ending. We are not threatened by a comet. We are halfway through its effect. The crater already exists beneath our feet. The sky is already plunged into darkness. At least the dinosaurs had the decency of being surprised. We have chosen the shame of denial.

Americans like to imagine ourselves as the city on the hill, the shining light, but the light is a train in our dark tunnel.

The comet has not gone away from our skies. It's just burned overhead since 1939, growing brighter with each decade of denial. Bombers and tanks. DDT and plastics. Oil rigs and trawlers. Nuclear winters rehearsed and climate summers endured. Coral bleached to death. Forests burned for burgers. Oceans foamed with acid. Skies choked with carbon. Flesh filled with microplastics. We've carried our own extinction in shopping carts and ballot boxes, in corporate ledgers and campaign platitudes.

Politicians went on smiling. Media went on selling. Freshman firebrands gave speeches, shaped them into books, and gave up seats to successors. The comet hung in the sky, but its light was good for ratings, its shadow good for money, its silence good for dynasty.

And now—all but a century ago—we are in the storm surge. The Anthropocene shudders. Species fall like dominoes. Glaciers break like glass. Fields perish. Insects vanish. Children gasp at air that is not air. There is no need to predict apocalypse. We stand within its trappings. We are all self-mutilation. 

The dinosaurs did not have a choice. We do. And yet still we will not choose a viable now, a persistent future. That is our shame. That is our inscription.

On the Ground

• 1939 Ocean Acidity (pre-industrial baseline): ~8.21
• 2025 (current estimate): ~8.05–8.1
• Change: ~0.1–0.15 decline → ~30% increase in hydrogen ion concentration (Acid!), stressing and killing marine life

• 1939 Ocean Plastics (pre-industrial baseline): negligible plastic in oceans
• 2025 (current estimate): millions of tonnes of plastic, more plastic than many ocean lifeforms in some regions
• Change: massive increase → widespread contamination, microplastics pervasive, severe threat to marine ecosystems

What Actions the Red/Blue Vapor Paradigm Took: Fired Bullets at Skulls

The comet is not arriving.

It has arrived.

It is us.

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The Red-Blue Mirage: Punctuated by Humanity’s Demise

Cathy Smith