What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade
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Offer valid in US and Canada. Exclusions apply. See details online. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Leila Ismail. What if apocalypse isn't the end of the world, but a chance to remake it? On today's episode, we're joined by science journalist Lizzie Wade to explore Apocalypse, her bold new book about how catastrophe has shaped humanity's past and can help forge a more just future.

Drawing on archaeology and anthropology, Wade reframes collapse not as destruction, but transformation, revealing how people have endured pandemics, climate shocks and civilizational upheaval before, and what their stories can teach us now. Joining Wade in discussion is global historian and author of On Savage Shores, Caroline Dodds-Pennock. Let's join Caroline now with more. Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Caroline Dodds-Pennock.

Our guest today is Lizzie Wade. Lizzie is a science journalist based in Mexico City who has written about archaeology and anthropology for Science, The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times, Eon and others.

Today, we're discussing Lizzie's new book, Apocalypse, How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures, a richly imagined new insight into the great human tradition of apocalypse from the rise of Homo sapiens to the climate instability of our present. And she reveals how these cataclysmic events are not irrevocable endings, but rather transformations. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Lizzie. I'm so delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for talking to us. I'm excited to speak with you. I've set one of your articles for my students before, so it's a pleasure to have a chance to talk with you. And one of the things I wanted to start with is how you're defining apocalypse and thinking about it, because you write in the book that apocalypse isn't an ending, but rather a transformation. So you ask,

What could we learn if we looked at the apocalypse of human extinction through the lens not of violence, competition and disappearance, but of community, creativity and survival? And that's a really powerful way to reframe quite a familiar idea, I think. Can you explain what drew you to this way of thinking about collapse and survival? Of course. So, yeah, so I define apocalypse in the book as,

As you say, a transformation, I think that's the really key word to keep in mind and the one that I always came back to in terms of thinking about events in the past and in the present and future. You know, a longer definition that I use is change.

that apocalypse is a rapid collective loss that fundamentally changes a society's way of life and sense of identity. So, you know, in contrast to sort of a more singular natural disaster, such as, you know, something we might think of as the volcanic eruption at Pompeii, that, of course, was completely devastating for that city.

And all the people who lived in it, and many of whom died, even more of whom had to go on to rebuild their lives elsewhere. But, you know, it didn't take down the Roman Empire, for example, it didn't fundamentally change the politics, or the subsistence strategies, or the government, you know, and I think, but there are

you know, more sustained apocalypses that did. So, you know, climate change in our present is one. Climate change in the past is another one. You bring up the apocalypse I start out the book with, which is the extinction of other human species around 40,000 years ago, most famously the Neanderthals, but not exclusively Neanderthals.

And, you know, I think I came to the topic through my reporting on archaeology. I felt I've written a lot about archaeology in the Americas. And, you know, one of the, you know, classic, iconic stories of American archaeology writ large is the classic Maya collapse and these sort of abandoned cities in the jungle and what happened to the people who lived there and what happened to

the society that they built that was obviously so grand and archaeologists of the past had interpreted it as having disappeared. But when I went out with archaeologists into the field or talked to them about their work, these stories of disappearance, tragedy, loss,

forgetting, endings, that wasn't really the story that they were finding and that wasn't the story they were interested in studying. And you know, what they really wanted to see was what happened after, how people survived, how people regrouped, how these cataclysmic events

rippled through societies, you know, and affected different kinds of people in those societies in different ways from the, you know, elites who would be buried in royal tombs to the commoners who, you know, unexpectedly may have had a lot more choices when the worst came to pass. And, you know, so I just felt like, you know, we have all these

stories about apocalyptic events, all these post-apocalyptic pop culture and myths that we're accustomed to that are about violence and endings and sort of the impossibility of empathy during events like these.

And, you know, these disappeared societies that leave nothing behind. And I just felt like, you know, that wasn't the story I was seeing through the science and through the archaeology. And it's not the story archaeologists study. And I just felt like we really we deserve better stories and truer stories about our past, especially as we confront a future that's going to be just as if not more apocalyptic than anything I described in the book. And absolutely. And I want to come on to that kind of contemporary resonance in a little bit. But

Can I ask why you think this collapse narrative is so persistent that you've been talking about? Because as you say, we hear about the Maya collapse. We hear about the disappearance of these civilizations, something that often neglects the ongoing living peoples that are left behind. Why is it that history has been so drawn to these kind of clean endings when the reality is actually much messier than that, as you've been saying?

I think that's a wonderful question and one that I continually ask myself, like, why when these stories, when these true stories are so rich and so fascinating and really, you know, I rarely use the word inspiring, but, you know, so there's so many possibilities contained in them. Why have we gotten stuck with the most boring versions of these events and the scariest, you know? And

the ones that make us feel like a future is impossible. And I think it's actually because through archaeology and also through sort of the way that the past was recorded in the past and by who, we've ended up with

you know, a really elite view of these events. So in ancient Egypt, for example, which is one of the stories in my book, we have this incredible, you know, papyrus by a scribe who at least purports to have lived through sort of the first collapse of the ancient Egyptian state.

And the descriptions are so vivid of, you know, of a prolonged drought, of people walking into the Nile and committing suicide by crocodile rather than try to survive this political collapse of a unified Egyptian state and the Nile floods that it relied on. And

But, you know, when we look at the archaeology, which is harder to find in a lot of cases than these texts that have survived...

We see, you know, people who didn't get to write their experience into the historical record often had really different experiences of these events. You know, when society was kind of, when the hierarchies of societies were coming apart, obviously the people at the top, the elite court scribe was going to have a really different experience in that than someone who didn't have that much to begin with or had to, you know, whose labor was conscribed and

exploited by the hierarchy that existed when the state was unified, when that unification breaks apart, that person might have a lot more opportunities. And similarly, with the classic Maya collapse, although we don't have, you know, the same kind of descriptions of those events recorded in Maya history, or at least whatever text might have done that did not survive to the present, they

There are, you know, there's a sense that a city was abandoned when we find the last or when archaeologists find the last date carved into a stone monument. And, you know, that in a certain extent makes sense. There is some process in that city, some kind of life in that city that did come to an end with when history stopped being recorded in that same way. But it did not mean that

that one day to the next, everybody disappeared or died. It mostly meant that the elite...

The divine kings of the Maya world were losing their power for reasons we might not ever fully understand. It just didn't make sense to have a lot of artists and scribes and historians living in these cities. That didn't mean that nobody could continue to live in these cities or did. And I think archaeologists also has kind of a...

like an elite science or, you know, it's coming from that academy. It grows out of the 19th century, like these, you know, kind of wealthy European and American explorers going to other countries and taking their treasures back to the museums that we, where we can see them today, you know, where they were kind of primed

to see these events through one perspective and one perspective only. And archaeologists today are much more interested in trying to find the experiences that are harder to see or weren't recorded. So, you know, the commoners, the marginalized women, children,

And all of those people might have had a very different experience of these cataclysmic events. It's really important, isn't it? In your book, you talk about it's almost whose apocalypse is it from one person? It might be an apocalypse and for another, it's an opportunity to be liberated or to change their situation or be more creative. And one of the things in Apocalypse that spoke to me because I'm a cultural historian is that you're not just interested in what people are doing, but how they felt about what was happening around them.

kind of fears and hopes and dreams. But how is it that we can recover those sort of emotional landscapes from the archaeological record? You've touched on archaeology already. How do we know what people thought or dreamed about what was happening around them? How can we access those imaginations?

I think, you know, it's difficult and it's not always clear from the archaeology. But the, you know, I think we, for what I did, you know, the book contains lots of sort of imagined stories, but from known historical figures who may have written down their experiences or otherwise had them recorded like this Egyptian scribe who has a name. And some other stories are sort of from the lens of a community experience.

And I think, you know, trying to find those stories is very difficult. And a lot of it for me came from, you know, it really was an imaginative project. Like how and I tried to think not only how might people have experienced this event, but how have we been taught to think?

think about their, what their most likely feelings were, you know, fear, catastrophe, running, you know, catastrophe, collapse. We sort of think of them as

as terrifying experiences, and I think they often were. But I also tried to think about, okay, what might my own cultural conditioning, like be encouraging me to leave out of these stories and to try to find those pieces of it. So for example, one, you know, foundational apocalypse in our species history, I would say is the sea level rise at the end of the last ice age. And

And when we think about that, we think about loss, right? Like the loss of environments, the loss of homes, you know, how we imagine like what is happening to us and what will continue to happen to us. But I think when you actually think, okay, how would this have played out on the scale of a human life or a human, you know, a few human generations, so you could have a collective memory that gets passed down, you know,

Often these environments that were slowly drowning were also extremely productive and welcoming to humans and their communities, especially places where people were hunting and gathering and fishing. And instead of trying to think about the rising sea taking something away, trying to see it as maybe what could the rising sea be giving these people who lived in such intimate places?

relationship to it over such a long period of time. And of course, you know, I can't say I can't claim that my that the stories I tell in my book are necessarily 100% exactly how people felt and experienced things in the past. But I think they have just as much evidence behind them as the more pessimistic

and violent stories that we've sort of been indoctrinated with. And I think we deserve to be able to imagine something different and better. Yeah, it's a challenge, isn't it? Because historical empathy, it can be such a distant, the way people think in the past is it can be so distant from us. And there are some cultures that you're imagining in the book,

that we have absolutely no records of how they may have thought or felt. And so, of course, you talk a lot about archaeology and that's a lot of your background is working with archaeologists in journalism and so on. Do you think archaeology has evolved recently in a way that allows us better access to some of this? I mean, how much is it that the archaeology in recent years has improved such that you kind of have a starting point for these stories?

Oh, I think absolutely that's a huge part of it. You know, I think if I were a science journalist in the 1920s, like covering archaeology, the stories I would be hearing from scientists and researchers would be extremely different, still very set in these elite narratives. And I think as archaeology, as their scientific toolkit has expanded to include things like dietary isotope analysis,

you know, more ancient DNA, even simpler things like, you know, just really detailed bioarchaeology, chemical residues left on ceramics, for example, like the amount of information archaeologists can get out of the things they find, which can seem, you know, humble in the extreme. I mean, it's

A lot of the time, ancient people's trash. And sometimes it looks like it, you know, like it's not, it's very rarely will you get a beautiful, you know, painted pot emerge intact from an excavation. And, but it's in that kind of accumulation of trash.

less impressive artifacts, let's say, and different ways of looking at them that can really reveal perspectives that, you know, a royal tomb just would never capture despite the fact like how beautiful and stunning those artifacts can be. That is such a limited view of a past of any society, you know, it would be like excavating, I don't know, like the White House or, you know, like a

an elite space of government and or the richest, fanciest neighborhood in a city and claiming that was the experience of everyone who lived in it when, you know, our own experiences. That's obviously not the case. And we can really appreciate that in our own world and in more recent history. But we but it has been harder to appreciate in the past. But these new tools of archaeology are really opening new perspectives. And archaeologists themselves are

They're much more open to different kinds of stories, much more excited to work with local communities to incorporate local knowledge into what they study, the questions that they ask.

And, you know, it's less about, okay, what do I as like this foreign, this white foreign explorer coming to another country and taking all these beautiful artworks. It's less about the elite artifacts themselves.

past generations of archaeologists might have been most interested in just because of the way they looked and what they said about the leadership structure of the society and more about, you know, the experience of everyone else. And I think that, you know, the scientific shifts in the field have been really important and have sort of been in a feedback loop with this more philosophical shift of whose stories are

Absolutely. That's something we've seen, of course, in history as well. The marginalized history is coming to the center more, which is fascinating. And your example about Doggerland and the Great Drowning about 7,000 years ago, I think, was showing how there's this period between the Mesolithic and the Middle Ages.

And the Paleolithic, I think it is, this is not my specialism, which is often overlooked. It's seen just as a transitional moment. But even just recovering the very ordinary objects from the bottom of the ocean is enabling us to fill in the gaps there. And I mean, it is a book that goes really right into deep.

time, isn't it? From ancient drought to modern climate chaos. And I wonder why you felt it was important to take this lingerie approach to apocalypse. Yeah, I think, you know, one of the feelings that I had when thinking about the world that we live in and the future that we are entering and that, you know, our, you know, generations to come are going to live in is the

One of the things that makes it so scary is the sense that

that it's unprecedented and that we're entirely alone, you know, and there's nothing we can learn from, you know, we're the first humans to have caused such a catastrophic change in our climate. There's no real sense that's going to stop. And even if it did stop tomorrow, we are still locked into a certain amount of really scary changes. And the sense that, yeah, that we're the first people to experience something like this.

And to a certain extent, of course, there are pieces of it that are unique, like the possible climate extremes that climate change could result in over the course of centuries or millennia, you know, really are unprecedented. But I think that emotional experience of looking around you and having an environment that you thought you understood and trusted and could count on become unfamiliar, you know, within the span of a few years or decades is

The sense that natural disasters have started coming and are keeping coming in ways that you never expected or knew to prepare for. The sense that a government that you thought was stable and that stability was important to your concept of the world and your place in it.

When that starts to disintegrate, who are you? Is that something that we need to resist at all costs? Or can that be a solution to problems that have been brewing for a long time? You know, I think all of those could have potential, you know, all of those can have different answers. There's not one way people have experienced apocalypses, even in the same society. But I think that sense, I really wanted to bring to life that

that sense that we are not actually alone in what we're facing in the future, that so many people have been through similar experiences in the past.

And they were likely just as freaked out as we are today in their own, you know, in their own ways and reacted to it in their own ways. But like we are, there are things we can learn from the past and not just about how to prevent these catastrophes. Because I think, you know, we're in a lot of denial right now about how, what is coming for us and how, and, you know, what,

how society might need to change in response to it. And I think being able to look in the past and seeing not only did people have these emotional experiences and went through these events, but they adapted, they survived, they created new things, they really seized the opportunity to transform, and they didn't stay the same as they were before the apocalypse arrived. And I think that that's just such an important lesson

lesson to learn from our ancestors. And I think, you know, we there are so many different ways to be human. And we've experimented with so many already. And there's certainly so many more to come. And I think that sense of possibility in the past that there are people who have been through exactly all of the things we are so scared of, and they figured it out. And I think that's so important for us to have in mind as we face our own future.

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And one of the things that you emphasise is that we're already living in a post-apocalyptic world, that the situation that's created now has come from former apocalypses, from slavery, from environmental extraction, things that were deliberately created by

that came to some communities and were created by others, essentially that the West created these environmental crises, for example, in Mexico City, where you live. And there are huge problems now with flooding and so on because of what happened in the colonial period. And...

I think one of the most compelling arguments in Apocalypse is the one that you're talking about, this idea that we've already lived through as a culture, as humans, so many of the things that people are really terrified about today, things like pandemics and climate shocks and political instability. And as someone who works on Aztec Mexica histories, that's my specialism, I was really particularly struck by the discussion of the Spanish invasion of Tenochtitlan and the colonial chaos that came after that.

And I wondered if there was a particular historical apocalypse that felt especially resonant to you in this current moment. I don't know if it's appropriate to ask for one that offers warnings or inspiration, or if it's just, you know, are we standing on the edge of something that feels familiar to you from what you've been studying, but...

Yeah, no, I think the Mexico example is a great one. You know, we've been taught to sort of see our world today as this kind of inevitable culmination of centuries of progress. And we kind of have nowhere to go but down from here. And that was part of what makes it so scary to think about, you know, how our societies might need to change and change quite radically in the future. And, you know, in the book, I argue that.

This is actually already a post-apocalyptic world, and there's nothing like that's so great about it or so special that we can't think of other ways to do things and transform. And one that really has stuck with me is the birth of El Nino on the north coast of Peru. So El Nino obviously affects climate around the world, but it really is quite catastrophic on the north coast of Peru, which is a very dry desert interspersed with

very lush river valleys. And during an El Nino event, these valleys will flood. And, you know, normally there's almost no rain in this environment, and there'll be huge amounts of rain all of a sudden, flash floods, mudslides, destruction, you know, it still is, you know, enormously destructive to the people who live there. And the industries that are based there, you know, kind of large scale, industrial farming of rice and sugarcane. And in the past, you

Archaeologists have found that El Niño actually sort of comes and goes over long, long tens of thousands of years periods. And El Niño as we know it today kind of appeared around 5,800 years ago.

Although a slightly less frequent, you know, it came slightly less frequently than it does today. And I think what has stuck out for me about that story is that we would think and we are thinking now in this period of, you know, this sense that like natural disasters are getting worse, environments that we trusted can no longer be predicted, you know, and only knew it's like almost the environment becomes like the opposite of what people have grown to expect.

And I think in our, as we talked about in our post-apocalyptic stories, we sort of think that would inevitably lead to a fragmenting of the communities we've built. It might make it impossible to cooperate, impossible to build something new, impossible to look towards the future because you're like, just all you can do is prepare for the next disaster. And actually, what archaeologists see in Peru is the exact opposite that, you know, shortly after El Nino erupted,

was born as we know it, people really started coming together to build big societies, big monuments, sometimes with the mud El Nino left behind, which is very evocative of could this be a monument?

to El Nino in some sense. Of course, we don't have writing, so it's hard to know for sure. But the fact that the building materials are left behind by these floods and places that people couldn't occupy before become really rich wetlands over the course of decades of this disaster. And people sort of

Yeah, people come together in new ways and start cooperating on these really big projects. And, you know, eventually leads to some of the most complex and biggest societies the world has ever seen. And that doesn't happen in, you know, that happens because of El Nino in some sense, or it's possible to see it that way. And I think that that really made me think differently about what could be possible for our future, that it's not just

you know, inevitable fragmenting and desperation, but, you know, opportunities to build different kinds of communities and interact with the environments around us in any way. I mean, you say that climate change, and we're familiar with this story today as a slow moving apocalypse, you know, it's moving too slowly for individuals to see it coming. And similarly, when you look at apocalypse in the book, over the lifetime of an individual or over a generation, it's

It may seem pretty bleak all in all, but it's in the long term often that you see these big changes. But there are a few cases, aren't there, where you see quite revolutionary changes happen quite fast. I'm thinking in particular of when you talk about the Black Death. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about the social transformation that happens there, because there's a really fascinating shift that I think people don't often think about.

Yeah, so the Black Death, you know, is probably one of the most apocalyptic events that we can imagine and that truly people lived through. Was it like 30 to 60% mortality in about four years across Europe? It's staggering. I mean, even living, even researching and writing about this during the COVID pandemic, I mean, it was just...

beyond anything I could have ever imagined. And I think anything any of us can imagine, and we'll hopefully, you know, never have to experience anything like that. I mean, the sense of

loss and the speed of it was just staggering. And, you know, but I think there's been a sense that because there was a sense among people back then, who are living through it, that, you know, they obviously interpreted their world and mostly through religion. And so there's a lot of

religious interpretations of this event, like comparisons to Noah's flood and being worse than Noah's flood and, you know, a punishment from God. There's a lot of like astrological interpretations that to us seem like quite strange and mystical that for people then would have been very vivid and alive. And there's a sense that it just ripped through

that it was uncontrollable, that had no rhyme or reason, no pattern to it. And when you're living through the loss of 50% of people that you know in this course of a year, because of course it took four years or so for it to make its way across Europe, but in a certain place it could rip through it in a matter of months or maybe a year if it was a bigger city. And people thought that

There was, you know, it was just kind of an act of God, like literally and in the ways that we think about it. But, you know, archaeologists can see today how it was actually, you know, mediated by the inequalities and the hardships that had already existed in European societies and particularly Europe.

In English society is where a lot of this research has come up. And, you know, people who are already fragile and had health problems in the past, most likely because of malnutrition and poverty, which had really risen in the century before the Black Death, you know, they were the ones who were most likely to die of this disease. But then after, you know, within quite short order, there was

kind of no one left to do the work of keeping everyone else alive. So, you know, society was sort of organized, it's feudal society, so it's kind of organized around these manors and estates. And suddenly the people who were farming or taking care of animals or, you know, the workers who are really keeping these estates running, the people that survived had, you know, incredible

societal power over that they'd never had before and because they were really needed and there was really no one left to to do this necessary work. And so they started demanding higher wages, started being able to move around more.

And kind of the similarly to how the scribe in ancient Egypt describes it, like society was kind of turned on its head, and the people at the bottom are suddenly, you know, I wouldn't go so far as to say they found themselves on the top of the society, but they found themselves with a lot more options and choices. And, you know, able to put pressure on history and on their lives in a way that they really couldn't before. And, you know, we see this

And of course, this is difficult to, we can see some of these effects in people's bones. There was quite a health really improved after the Black Death, not necessarily because of the Black Death. There were a lot of climate challenges in the century before that led to the poverty arising. But, you know, it seems like life changed.

As workers demanded a lot more agency and power, the health effects, malnutrition wasn't quite as widespread. People grew taller, lived longer. There were health effects that the health signals improved throughout the society. But we also see in the historical record, of course, the elites writing again, just how much resistance there were to malnutrition.

these changes. And, you know, the English Parliament is passing laws up until 40 years after the Black Death is over, which is especially back then, several generations of people trying to keep workers back in their place, trying to limit, you know, restrict wages to what they were before the plague, trying to keep people from moving around and negotiating and bargaining. And, you know, I think that you could say you could see that as, you know, of course, that was quite a

oppressive, and did, I'm sure, limited people's lives again in certain ways. But the fact that that backlash went on for so long among people who wouldn't even been alive during the Black Death, that just to me revealed just how transformative these social changes were and how scary and how

How scary for the elites to think that society could be organized in a fundamentally different way. And of course, within a few centuries, it was organized in a fundamentally different way. And it's quite clear, isn't it, that there are people seizing this opportunity even as the elites try to stop them. And as you say, that doesn't mean that they suddenly were the richest people in society, but new cracks opened up that allowed them leverage that they didn't have before.

You don't have to work very hard to make the leap to the COVID pandemic and some of the debates that happened around that about access, about equality, about justice, about climate justice and inequities in medical care, treatment and so on around the COVID pandemic. And you're very careful, in fact, in the book to say that apocalypse isn't fair. It's not painless. You're not creating this idea. It's a utopian apocalypse. But I wonder how...

How do you think, having studied this pattern of historic apocalypses, how do you think we should be thinking about ideas around justice and inequality as we face the crises that we're certainly facing today and in the near future?

Great question. I mean, it's something I thought about a lot. Because, you know, one of the actual original meaning of the word apocalypse is the, is a revelation, the unveiling, the revealing. And I think, you know, that was a sense that I, you know, I had started researching this book before the COVID pandemic, and that was

That was a meaning I sort of struggled to understand and how it had been incorporated into like the, you know, a more modern meaning of disaster and end of the world and whatever. And then, you know, in March 2020, as my life completely changed, as so many of ours did, you know, that sense of being able to see things that I couldn't see before this sense that everything was was up for grabs suddenly, and all these rules of society, whether that's

that you had to go to school or you had to go to an office or whose work, whose labor really matters the most to keeping society running. Who's like, how are we, you know, thinking of ourselves as individuals instead of in a collective network borders, you know, like it all sort of came crashing down around us. And I think that that,

I think a lot of people have wanted to forget that feeling of, you know, total, you know, I want to call it liberation almost, like it was, but in a very scary and unexpected way, like where you sort of had to, where you realize that everything sort of had to be put back together from scratch. And I think a lot of people didn't want to do that. And that was, that has contributed to a lot of the,

issues we've had since, I would say. And, but I think, you know, the sense of justice, you know, I think in apocalypses, as we saw in the COVID pandemic, in that case, the as in the Black Death, you know, pre existing patterns of inequality, health disparities, which are obviously connected to racism, colonialism, all the kind of organizing hierarchies of our society, like,

Things that we'd naturalized as being kind of just the way things are or something that we don't have a lot of agency to change, you know, the how the consequences of those became extremely stark and like literally life or death overnight.

And in a way that they'd always been, but we maybe hadn't been able to see in quite such a stark way, you know. And so I think these moments of apocalypses are times when how a society really works becomes evident sometimes.

you know, many of the people living in it, I would say. And of course, it's hard to know how, you know, commoners like in Chin Ujipter, the classic Mayaklaps, the commoners are not really writing down, and they're not like journaling about their feelings, as we are sure to have in when we study the history of the COVID pandemic. But you know, that sense that, you

The way things work is something about it has turned rotten, you know, like something about it clearly is destroying us. And I think that those moments of

you know, apocalypses are because they're transformations. Like the transformations just don't happen because of the natural disaster or the pandemic or the climate change. They happen because of the people transforming and deciding, looking around at their society and saying, this isn't working for us anymore. What do we need to do? What are we going to do next? Who are we going to be? How are we going to change? And I think people in the past have

When we look at their arc of these stories on a centuries-long basis, we can see those transformations happening. And I think many of us have the sense that while the pandemic is over, its story is over, its narrative is over, we're going to kind of lock it in a box and not thinking about it again. But looking at the Black Death and how long those reverberations lasted, it's

through European society. I just think we have no idea how this story is going to end. And I think there's still just a lot of transformations that it has in store for us and how it intersects with climate change. We're living through these things minute to minute and hour to hour and year to year. And we just don't know the end of these things yet. But I think this sense of

being able to see the things that we need to and want to change about a society, though that's a real gift of apocalypse. And I think one that we will have, you know, unfortunately have many opportunities to seize in the coming years. I think that message is a good one to end on for people to take away from this and hopefully to read your book and to take away from it, which is that

It's not about the circumstances that create the apocalypse. It's about people's response to it and the choices that they make during those events and afterwards. That was Lizzie Wade, author of Apocalypse, How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures. It's available online now and at a bookshop near you.

I've been Caroline Dodds-Pennock, and that was Intelligence Squared. Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Mia Cirenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts. In honor of Military Appreciation Month, Verizon thought of a lot of different ways we could show our appreciation, like rolling out the red carpet, giving you your own personal marching band, or throwing a bumping shindig.

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