IT'S perfectly evident that in the next twenty or thirty years were going to have the end of the world and it's going to be all over.

If one tanker full of DDT were to be broken up in a storm tomorrow, the way so many oil tankers already have been, that DDT would be enough to slow the photosynthesizing micro-plants of the oceans. These plants produce ninety percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere. In as much time as it took us to breath the remaining oxygen. It would all grind to a halt once and for all.

Such an occurrence is known in the trade as an "eco-catastrophe." in other words, a situation in which the ecology of the earth is irretrieyably disturbed. Little mini-eco-catastrophes have been happening ever since man arrived on the scene. In the South, Pacific collectors, naturalists, and trumpeters on hundreds of islands have been picking up tritons off the coral reefs and beaches to get their conch shells. The tritons cat the starfish which prey on the coral animals that build up the reefs. Because there are now so many people on the earth, they are now picking up enough tritons so that the coral reefs are crumbling. And after a while most of those islands and parts of Australia are going to be washed away.

Picking tritons is illegal, but the law can't be policed. There are other, quite legal, ways in which we are steadily bringing about the end of the world. Just for an example, there's the Greenhouse Effect gone wild. Our heavy industry, oil heat, and combustion in general are putting too much CO2 into our air. CO2 in our atmosphere absorbs ultraviolet radiation from the sun (reflected off the earth) as heat. This is called the Greenhouse Effect. It was important in the evolution of the earth into a life-supporting planet. The world is getting hotter and hotter. When it gets hot enough, the polar ice caps will start to melt. This will raise the level of the oceans 300 feet. This will cover the land on which two-thirds of the world's people live. Many people know about this problem. They also know they can't do anything about it.

The Army, at its Fort Detrick in Fredeick, Maryland, is every day refining diseases that no one will be able to stop. At the Pine Bluff (Arkansas) Arsenal they've stored up enough anthrax, tularemia. Q fever, and psittacosis to kill everyone in the world several times over, a Congressman told a reporter of this paper. And at the Dugway Proving Grounds, a million acre base in Utah, where they test this stuff, they have a "permanently contaminated area." If a bird ever flew in and out of there, he could share it with the rest of us.

The end is coming soon one way or another. But we've had a sense of this ever since we picked up on the atom bomb. A doctor recently published in Esquire his findings on a study he did on the effects of atomic radiation on people. He says that if the U. S. ever used the ABM to save itself, the radiation the ABM put in the air would make it impossible for any people born after the attack to ever have children themselves.

It should be pointed out that man tried to stop himself from building this doomsday machinery, but he failed. And this is only a clue to the true vastness of the futility in trying to avoid the end of the world. For while perhaps Esquire's doctor is wrong and maybe the winds of the uper atmosphere will keep the earth cool and the ice caps frozen, there still remains the threat of thousands of unforescen catastrophes that we are only now becoming capable of.

UPUNTIL about twenty-five years ago man couldn't have brought about the end of the world even if he wanted to. After we invented and then stockpiled enough nuclear weapons, it became possible, but not likely. Since then, spreading technology has made us liable to extinction unpredictably, suddenly, and by accident (with no evil will involved!). When we became liable to it, its occurrence became inevitable.

One of the ways we've just this summer made it possible to happen is by bringing back, from the planets and moons of outer space, viruses we can't defend against. But it will much more likely come from some little flaw we hardly notice in the intricately complex technology of our stranglingly large population. The gathering of conch shells.

And it will happen soon- before the year 2000- because what god could possibly still the hand of a Fate so powerful, a technology so globe-encompassing, for a time so long as 30 years? Not a chance.

To help you further conceptualize this reality, imagine that everyone changed their assumption and took it for granted that the world is soon to end. Now imagine that in spite of the general downhill course of events in the world, in spite of New York City, high rents, high prices, bad air, worse water, transit strike, teachers' strike, garbage strike, two hours on the freeway, in spite of the telephone company, a 2 billion dollar corporation that can't give you a dial tone and doesn't know why- in spite of all this, someone stood up before these people in Sanders Theatre and tried to defend the position that the world would find miraculous ways to survive to the year 2000. You can see that he would quite rightly be laughed off the podium.

Ordinarily we would try to fight the inevitable disaster by effecting social and political change. But you and I both know how hopeless that is. As we watch Procaccino gurgle to victory in November, we can kiss goodbye to the electorate. Then we can turn to the RYM, PL, the CP, the WSA, SDS, the P and FP, the BP, BDRG, and the Weathermen. And even if we pulled off a fantastic proletarian revolution right away and started reorganizing everything, it would be 50 years before they got around to air pollution. And the world will be long gone by then.

No political group is going to destroy technology, give all the women birth-control diaphragms, and turn us out into the woods. And we don't even want them to do that to us. Man likes to live out his destiny. There is something philosophically intriguing about seeing your own demise coincide with that of civilization. And that raises the question of whether you should vote for Procaccino to hasten the catastrophe and insure that you live to see the end. There are those who would say that being around at the end would put more meaning into your life. But they are wrong. Meaning, as far as living goes, we all know comes only in the moment and for that moment. Being there at the moment it's over has no more intrinsic value than being there when it's on.

ATTENDANT to the approaching end, you will notice, has been an expotential rise of unhappiness in the world. If you remember, things were pretty good as recently as 1959. Then, with the '60's, they began to deteriorate. Most of the misery has come predictably from the cities where all the technology and absurd population boom has been concentrated. And overall, when compared to how things were even only a few years ago, it's all much worse.

You have, for example, the fall of art. No one, not anyone, no one at all spends any time these days on what he creates. More god damned books are made out of unedited collected speeches of semi-verbal figures of the press. Painters use unmixed primary colors bought in buckets from hardware stores. Sculptors put whatever they "discover" in the street on a pedestal and we've got " art trouve. " And rock musicians break up their groups if they don't get a recording contract five months after they start playing together.