Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal

What I found most striking about this article was its view on "natural disasters." The name itself, of course, implies that things such as tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, and all the havoc they wreak, are "natural," and therefore are not something that can be helped or prevented. Diaz points out a completely different point of view, and admittedly not a point of view I've heard of. He says these disasters are not so "natural" after all. It scares me to think that these disasters are practically brought on by humanity's blindness to the necessity of natural defenses such as coral reefs, mangroves, and forests. If we, as a society, can't even see that our destructive actions are razing lands and killing thousands of people, who's to say this won't continue until everything is in ruin, and we no longer have any natural resources to recover from the mess we're in? Hopefully that thing which Diaz hopes to happen does actually happen- where people will finally realize, after another "natural disaster," that there is something that must be done, and we will attempt to put a stop to the destruction of our land and resources.

9/11/2014 - Tommaso Angelini

Apart from watching a couple post-apocalyptic movies I have not had much experience reading the "post-catastrophic novel" as Chad Harbach so eloquently puts. After reading Harbach's set of summaries, from Mary Shelley's The Last Man to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, I found it quite interesting how post-apocalpytic stories and novels have evolved over time. One point Harbach made that struck me was the idea that post-apocalpytic novels parallel the era in which they were written. For example, most of the stories that were written before the Cold War, revolved around a dystopia-like setting. Novels like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984 immediately come to mind. These type of stories focused on governments restricting people's liberties and freedoms in an effort to have total social control. Authors like Huxley and Orwell most likely could not conceptualize the idea of global nuclear warfare. However, after World War II and the Manhattan Project, post-apocalpytic novels started to change in accordance with the time period. I found this incredibly interesting because even though "the end of the world notion" is often criticized and disparaged by skeptics, apocalyptic novels still manage to maintain themes that resemble and parallel what is going in the world. I never would have described apocalyptic novels as realistic, but after reading Chad Harbarch's The End I was convinced that this genre has a lot to offer for people who are trying to explore the fantasy side of literature while still learning about history and repercussions  (regardless of how far fetched they may be) caused by our previous past actions.