It is probably a bias of the BBC/NPR axis – the sort of radio I listen to – but it seems to me that news-radio programming has been harping a subtly apocalyptic set of themes lately, focusing on such issues as sustainability, global warming, the obesity epidemic and rampant consumerism. Frankly, despite the self-evident importance of these issues, I find them more depressing than the more standard war/murder/terror/chaos/scandal fare. That's because it's possible to be optimistic for the long-term future in the face of the latter, as we've been living with that sort of thing throughout history and things nevertheless persist in getting better. But the former themes of environmental degradation and ecological imbalance are genuinely scary vis-a-vis the long term, and there's little precedent for a human society successfully overcoming such dangers, while there's plenty of evidence of societies succumbing to them (e.g. Jared Diamond's well-documented histories of the Maya or Easter Islanders).
I listen to these radio articles about the upcoming virtually inevitable end-of-the-world and I find myself ideating (is that a word? it is now…) pulling a Kaczynski – go live in the mountains and be anti-human. Of course, my family is rife with tendencies in this general direction, anyway. So I'm predisposed. But seriously, what can one do in the face of 7 billion people hell-bent on consuming themselves into extinction? On the other hand, is this just another episode of apocalypto-science, like the malthusian alarmism of an earlier, pre-"green revolution" era? Because human societies seem to crave an end-of-the-world narrative to keep things interesting….