A Less Boring Way To Think About The Apocalypse
Lizzie Wade's book brings some genuinely fresh, even hopeful thinking
Hello friends.
I know there is a LOT going on in the world—whew! I myself just got back from a five day retreat/convening of people engaged in the intersection of climate, contemplative practice, and wisdom traditions—primarily Buddhism, as well as several Indigenous knowledge holders. I will have a lot to share on that soon.
I have a brilliant and brave friend named Zain who used to be a student activist, blocking roads to protect old-growth forests and stop pipelines in British Columbia. He was deported back to Pakistan for his efforts, (Canadian? sign the petition to bring him home) and is currently publishing journalism there. It’s thanks to a recent update of his that I learned the country is dealing with repeated, and in some places unprecedented, catastrophic flooding.
With a GDP per capita of just $1500, Pakistan has a fraction of the disaster response infrastructure found in richer countries.
Pakistan has previously recorded the fourth-highest temperature, ever, anywhere on planet Earth.
Between the heat, the floods, and the droughts, growing food across this entire region is undoubtedly going to get tougher in the years to come, which is likely to displace many people in a place where borders are already heavily armed.
If you’re thinking “too bad for Pakistan,” I’ve got news, sorry. A version of these events is coming to a city near you. We set another global surface temperature record last year and that was just one in a long list of very bad records and anomalous events.
People find this topic, growing catastrophic climate change, upsetting and overwhelming. It’s also laden with a lot of uncertainty. So mostly there is a great silence.
My theory of change—my prime directive, in this phase of my life—goes like this:
Help people break through their denial and avoidance about the polycrisis and honor the pain underneath
Suffering is alleviated, people don’t feel so alone
More people take positive action
Recently I read a book that excited me and gave me a new lens on this work.
We avoid the topic of climate change because it feels like the end of the world.
But what if the end of the world isn’t the end of the world?
Lizzie Wade lives in Mexico City and is a science reporter with a specialty in archaeology. In this book she brings recent breakthroughs in the science of excavating the past, to tell fresh stories of several different apocalypses throughout history and prehistory.
Some may be more familiar, like the Black Death or the collapse of the Classic Maya.
Some were entirely new to me, like Doggerland, a European civilization gradually swallowed up by a 400-foot sea level rise known as the Great Drowning.
And some apocalypses, like colonialism, effectively never ended.
Wade wanted readers to think more creatively about ancient history and possible futures. “I just felt like there was a real mismatch between what archaeologists were learning about apocalyptic times in the past, and how we’re trained to think about them in our increasingly popular post-apocalyptic narratives,” she told me.
“These stories, that turn out to be wrong, are also extremely boring. And I felt like we were getting kind of trapped in them.”
The boring, wrong story is like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or The Last Of Us : lone individuals in a violent, barbarous wasteland, trusting no one. Or Silo or Mountainhead; some kind of elaborate bunker ruled over by the same elites that oppress us today.
Instead, what the historical record reveals over and over again is that people respond in diverse, resilient, and creative ways to the ending of their normal modes of life. And they do so communally, never alone.
Apocalypses bring real losses, tragedies. They also tend to upend hierarchies. Sometimes, in the process, they reduce inequality. And as certain pathways close off, they can also expand what’s possible for others.
“The highborn are full of lamentations, and the poor are full of joy,” Wade quotes one chronicler of the collapse of the Old Kingdom of Egypt in a megadrought more than four thousand years ago.
After the fall, Egyptian villagers no longer had to tithe their grain or send their young men to Giza to build the pyramids, so villages ended up more self-sufficient and more creative. They had fewer material resources, but more time. Wade writes:
“Farmers, with less work to do during the years of low floods, tried their hands at painting. Women, who were better at seeing how to fairly divide up the disappointing harvests, tried their hands at leading.”
One of my favorite examples is that potters started making tiny clay figurines depicting village life; once only rich people had access to this kind of art for their tombs.
So should we stop worrying and learn to love collapse? No. This isn’t a Pollyanna fable by any means. Some of these tales are chilling, like the story of Harappa, an ancient city in the province of Punjab, Pakistan, the very place my friend Zain is reporting from. Its script has never been deciphered, so there’s a lot we don’t know. But Harappa seems to have been a city with elaborate monuments, art, staple foods and goods traded over a large region, but no evidence of a monarch.
This civilization was gradually destroyed by the same megadrought that took down the Old Kingdom. But in the first phase of its demise, the city actually grew, as failing crops and a falling standard of living drove people to leave the countryside.
Sound familiar?
In thinking about these tales of the broad sweep of human experience over centuries, Wade doesn’t like to use the binaries of hopeful/optimistic vs. tragic/pessimistic. “All of these events can be all of these things,” she says, and it often depends on your position in society. “I think being able to hold that complexity and nuance in our heads is increasingly important, and we're, as a society, getting worse at it.”
Still, what I found fundamentally hopeful was the very act of imagining what comes after a cataclysm. Short of total human extinction, there is going to be something. As that something unfolds, people inevitably adapt. And we won’t just be losing what we love; as things fall apart, we might have a chance to also compost the nasty, brutal, idiotic parts of our society that serve no good purpose.
“It's not the end of everything. There will be other ways, and there will be other paths. And the paths we take are, in some very important way, up to all of us together.”
Come see me on the 21st!
I’m so excited to be co-facilitating this beautiful event dreamed up by Mor Keshet and in collaboration with Jess Serrante, the host of We Are the Great Turning. Register here and come for all or part of the time.
Thank you for this, and for the book recommendation! I’ll look forward to attending your virtual event next year :-)
Tell us more about the retreat you attended- it sounds fascinating!!
Another book that gave me hope about our climate crisis is “What If We Get It Right? By Ayana ElizabethJohnson
This was a great piece, thx for sharing it. The NYC event looks super creative + insightful. I live in Austin so can’t attend.
I’ve shared with my peeps in that corner of the world. Thx for your important work!