looks Like we're In For Stormy Weather

You can't say you weren't warned! Already the infernal riffs are popping up everywhere. 1999! What matter that it will make the Small One a Big Fortune. No wit, no style. Take the easy way out. The programmers follow the herd.

A lot of people are fed up already with this schtick. So what, they ask. It's no millennium for Muslims, Jews, Hindus or Buddhists. It's no millennium for pagans, atheists, animists either. And besides, it isn't even the right year!

Even if you're getting a bit of a buzz about the party, you'd be hard pressed not to empathise with this grumpy shruggery. Bah! And we're not even living in Israel where, apparently, quite significant numbers of crazies are headed, in the belief that the second coming will be right there on the Mount of Olives in the year 2000.

Millennial angst. It's a disease. It comes around every 1,000 years. People go hysterical. Last time out they went around whipping themselves and making daft pilgrimages.

Because so many humans have accepted the modern European dating system, the next year will act as a hinge of consciousness and, I suppose, we're lucky, in a rich western sort of way, to be there as time turns.

For any other species and indeed for almost all our own, it's of no significance. But then, Christianity and Judaism have always promoted their exclusivity, not their inclusivity. Loads of people don't know the redeemer is coming again? Great! Less competition for eternal life!

It's an insight into the grisly hold that those two religions (in particular) have over the western consciousness. They fit the capitalist, property-owning mentality like a glove. Exclusive offers. Exclusive golf clubs. Exclusive holidays. Exclusive homes. Exclusive countries.

I remember asking one bloke who was marketing "an exclusive development of luxury homes" would his firm not consider marketing an inclusive development. He looked at me as though I was about to eat his child.

But I'm not as mad as he thinks. Because, for all the sanity and kindness of real Christianity, and for all the goodness and art and altruism we find where we seek it, humanity destroys more than it saves.

The species is a superweed, according to a recent essay by David Quammen in the Independent on Sunday. He pointed out that we are "presiding over one of the great mass extinctions of recorded time," and that by 2150 more than half of the world's species are likely to have been effectively wiped out.

The argument is simple — in palaeontological time, there's been five mass extinctions of species on earth. We may now be in the early stages of the sixth. And whereas the last five were the result of natural catastrophes, like a huge meteor hitting Mexico's Yucatán peninsula and wiping out the dinosaurs, this one is man-made.

A mass extinction. A vast biological impoverishment. It's a startling and depressing vision. The best estimates are that in each of the previous five it has taken the earth between 5 and 10 million years to recover ecological fullness.

What that might be next time around is anybody's guess. The smart money is on humans to survive, accompanied by some relatively unsavoury characters, like rats and pigeons and the common cold virus.

Now, if you are a Christian, or a Jew, or a Muslim, or a member of hundreds of other religions, you believe in God. You also believe that humanity is, to all intents and purposes, a divine creation, and gifted with stewardship of the earth. In which case, humanity is allowed to fuck around with what it finds. If it rearranges the Garden of Eden, well, what of it?

This isn't about endangered species. Nor about trees. It isn't about "the environment", whatever individuals or groups might mean by that. It's about the loss of diversity, of alternatives, of fullness, of specialisations, of peculiarities. It's about the homogenisation of what Christians and Jews call creation. It's about the Big Mac-ing of the earth.

It may run even deeper. Some biologists believe that humans are, to quote David Quammen, "perturbing Earth's biosphere to a degree that it hasn't often been perturbed before". This is a radical experiment, in other words. Not just an extension of the way things have always been. And that's before the really big population explosion of the next century fully kicks in.

Of course, it may not come to pass. It may be that, sooner rather than later, humans will grasp what's afoot and will react in time to save the rain forests and the other key habitats. Stranger things have happened and there are some remarkable achievements around the world.

But bear in mind that the Earth is home to billions of species, some of them incredibly specialised. In tiny blocks of rain forest you can find animals, insects and plants which don't exist anywhere else. Remove, or even reduce, that patch of rain forest and that's it.

And globally, partly because we are increasingly numerous and partly because we are exclusive and want to become ever more comfortable, we are replacing these specialised species with transnational and standard varieties. You can even see it with apples. All those incredible varieties that grew in your grandad's orchard down the country are disappearing, replaced by green turnippy, and red, squashie standard cultivars.

Or in wine. If it weren't for the stubbornness of local grape farmers in southern France and Portugal in particular, we'd only have Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon. But some of the most interesting wines are made from weird and wondrous grapes. And the big fun for the 21st century is that, in Portugal, Croatia, Serbia and Georgia, there are grapes we've still not even heard of.

So which do we want? A world of uniformity or a world of diversity? A world of superweeds, populated by humans, cats, rats, cockroaches and grasses or a world of contrasts?

A world without frost and storms, to judge by the reactions to the last week of December and the first two weeks of January. A Canadian friend commented that she thought the Irish were "so funny" about the frosts of the 9th and 10th. Back home it was 20 below zero. Fahrenheit. Now, that's cold!

But apparently, we should all check our roofs, because 1999 will be a year of bad weather, and particularly dangerous hurricane activity. All the signs are there. In 1998 there were 10 hurricanes and 3 "intensive" hurricane systems. Hurricane Mitch, which you'll remember demolishing Nicaragua, was the fourth most powerful storm ever seen in the Caribbean.

Not only that, but it seems that we're also looking at a decade or more of the same.

Right!

Welcome to the Millennium!!

— The Hog