Worlds ended all the time.  I thought of captions I'd seen beneath photographs of the sky this morning: End of the world, they said.  Apocalypse sky.  It looks like a movie.  People were understandingly struggling for ways to describe the situation, but there was an egotism to such proclamations that I didn't feel comfortable with. The idea of a singular apocalypse suggested that there was only one world, only one end.  The notion of the end of the world was itself a flexible one: Earth had already experienced five extinction-level events, and it was at the start of a sixth.  The past two decades alone had seen several historic tsunamis cause mass death of people living along the coasts or islands of the Indian Ocean, the Sunda Straight, the Java Sea, and parts of the Pacific.  Historically, volcanoes had been common world-killers: in the Permian era, about 250 million years ago, a volcanic eruption killed approximately 90 percent of all species on Earth.  There were all sorts of ways the universe could end you: earthquake, flood, plague.  The one with the dinosaurs. And of course the human-made apocalypses: war, genocide, chattel slavery, climate change, the list was as unending as the world.  The end of humans had begun the moment someone decided to burn coal for fuel.  Or perhaps the root was in one of the many moments when people decided to keep burning it, even though we all knew where this was going.

The Last Fire Season

Manjula Martin.