Lizzie Wade on APOCALYPSE: What Collapse Reveals About Human Possibility

Transcript of Writer’s Voice podcast interview

Summary

On this episode of Writer’s Voice, we speak with science journalist Lizzie Wade about her groundbreaking book Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures. Through stories of ancient climate collapse, pandemic upheavals, colonial conquests, and societal reorganization, Wade shows that the end of a world is often the beginning of something new.

From the Neanderthal “extinction” to the fall of ancient Egypt, from the Great Drowning of Indigenous Australian coastlines to the climate-driven rise of El Niño societies in Peru, Wade explores how disasters reshaped political systems and economies. Crucially, she argues that today’s climate, social, and technological apocalypses offer not just threats, but transformative possibilities.

“Bringing to an end a type of society that isn’t working for the new world that’s emerging is not necessarily a bad thing. That’s called adaptation.” — Lizzie Wade

Transcript

(Edited lightly for smoother reading.)

FR: Lizzie Wade, welcome to Writer's Voice.

LW: Thank you so much for having me.

You know, I never thought that I would feel so inspired by a book that is titled Apocalypse. The world ended 7,000 years ago. It ended 4,000 years ago. It ended 700 years ago, 500 years ago. And it looks like it's ending now, too. But the story you tell is not gloom and doom.

Yeah, that was definitely my hope, you know.

I'm a journalist and I've been reporting on archeology for a long time. And archeologists, like so many of all of us, are really interested in what happens when societies end.

And you know, they can see kind of the whole sweep of those civilizations from beginning to end in a way that when we're living in the middle, we don't really have access to.

The more I spent time with them and the more I learned about the stories they were studying and uncovering, I just felt like, oh, the truth about these histories is not doom and gloom, as you say. It's much more interesting.

It's not that it's not tragic or difficult or scary or painful, but the worst things can happen over and over again, and they have, and somehow it's also always a new beginning.

And I really thought, you know, that's a message we could really use today. It happens to be one that's far better supported by the science of our shared past than the kind of stereotypes that we tend to, to learn about apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic realities.

You say we need to change how we think about human history and its apocalypses. And I think you've just given us a hint, but say more about that.

Yeah, especially in 2025 Western societies, there's a narrative that human history has been one of kind of inevitable progress, which is, the Neolithic revolution and farming and agriculture let us settle down and grow into these big societies and develop political and social complexity, which basically means like different kinds of people having different kinds of lives and responsibility within the community.

And then we had the Industrial Revolution and the unleashing of tremendous amounts of energy and in the direction of the hope and the stereotype as improving human experience and flourishing. And I don't think everyone has always experienced it that way. And certainly the rest of the planet hasn't always experienced that way. But that’s been the narrative we're told.

And now we're in this moment where the price of those changes is coming to a head. We can all feel that [with] climate change in particular.

And I think, you know, there's this sense that if human history has been this march of progress, that now we've reached the top, we're at the pinnacle, and we have nowhere to go but down. And that makes coming what's coming next, seem really scary.

And it's not that it isn't really scary. It's just that, like, I think that that narrative has trapped us in a sense that things are bound to get worse. There's only death and destruction and dark ages after the kind of challenges that our societies are facing.

And I just don't think that's what any society in the past has who has experienced such a challenge has really come out the other side with.

And I'd really love us to get away from this idea of progress and decline and think about much more, like endings, new beginnings, like cyclical ideas of renewal, even as the old things die.

And I think that new way of thinking about it—and actually it's a very old way of thinking about things I think that we've just kind of gotten away from and been indoctrinated with this very Western limiting worldview.

And I think once we can tell the story of our history in a new way, we can see all the opportunities that are actually inherent in our future, and not be so afraid to take advantage of them.

Yeah, I think of Karl Marx's words about the birth of the new world within the ashes of the old.

Definitely.

So what is your definition of apocalypse? What are the qualities that create it?

I was looking for a word that captured something beyond one natural disaster or one volcanic eruption or something like that, and really had the force to change an entire society quite quickly.

So I define apocalypse as a rapid collective loss that fundamentally changes a society's way of life and sense of identity.

And so I think for me, the three pieces of that is: it has to be relatively fast, which doesn't mean it has to be in a matter of years, although sometimes it is, like in the case of the Black Death was like five years. But it means that people have to be aware that these changes are happening over a collective memory timescale.

So it could be in the course of a human life, it could be grandparents, grandchildren— there's a sense that things are changing really quickly and that the world that the next generation is growing up in is not the world that the previous generation was familiar with.

It has to be collective. So that doesn't mean that everyone experiences an apocalypse in the same way. And I say in the book, it's certain that they won't actually, but everyone has to be reacting to this in some way and feeling a fundamental change in their lives.

And, you know, when the apocalypse is ongoing and a society is emerging from it, it has to have fundamentally reorganized certain things about who they are, whether that's the economy and the politics or the literal land that they live on in the case of sea level rise, which disappeared countless homelands around the world at the end of the last ice age, you know.

And it has to be a loss. Something that existed before has to not exist anymore after the apocalypse. But just because it's a loss doesn't necessarily mean it has to be a tragedy.

And, you know, some people would have experienced these things as tragedies. I think there are some apocalypses where everybody did, for example, the Black Death, which I just mentioned. But, not everybody always does, so it's a change that affects everyone, but differently.

And, you know, I think the key word for me in thinking about apocalypses in this book was transformation; the society really has to be transformed by this experience. They can't just recover and go back to normal.

There’s something like the eruption of Pompeii, which I think is something that was certainly apocalyptic for the people who experienced it, but it didn't really take down the Roman Empire. And so, that wouldn't quite rise to my definition of apocalypse.

But, for example, the sea level rise at the end of the last ice age, the Black Death, which really unleashed some repressed energy around social change, societal collapses, where the one way a society organizes politics and economy kind of unravels and produces something new.

Those are the kind of events I'm thinking about.

So, let's talk about some of them in more depth. You go way back to the Neanderthal apocalypse that was, or wasn't, maybe wasn't an apocalypse. First of all, what happened to the Neanderthals? And then talk about how maybe they didn't exactly go entirely extinct.

So, that was really, like, a foundational reframing for me when I started learning more about Neanderthals. I think the traditional story is that Neanderthals lived somewhere between like 300,000, 400,000 years ago to about 40,000 years ago.

So, that was quite a long time, perhaps even a little longer than Homo sapiens had existed by that point. And they lived in a world full of human diversity. There weren't only Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. There were many other species around the world that we really, I'm positive, have only scratched the surface of finding and understanding.

And so, the Neanderthals lived mostly in Eurasia. We’re most familiar with their remains from Western Europe, but they lived in the Middle East, they lived in Siberia, they lived all over the place.

And then around 40,000 years ago, they don't anymore. Their bones disappear, their tools, you don't find them anymore. And this is right around when Homo sapiens arrived in Neanderthal territory. And of course, right around in archaeological terms really means like five or 10,000 years of overlap; it's quite a long time.

But you know, when seeing it from archaeological perspectives, and especially the perspectives of these kind of early paleoanthropologists in the 19th century who were discovering Neanderthals and coming up with hypotheses about what may have happened to them, that kind of coincidence seemed to really tell the story for them.

Like obviously, another fitter, more “advanced,” more “evolved,” species arrived, and Neanderthals couldn't compete, and they went extinct.

But in human terms, that's a pretty long overlap, between five and 10,000 years.

Yeah, it's a huge overlap. And I think that something I wanted to get at in the book is: what do individual lives feel like during these long spans of time? I mean, that's one of the longer spans of time I talk about in the book.

But you know, the sea level rise took 2000 years, even something like the classic Maya collapse took 300 years, which like, is longer than the United States has existed as a country and think about how much stuff has changed during that time.

So trying to really drill down into a few decades of a human life during these experiences was something important to me and interesting.

And with the Neanderthals, one of the scientific tools that has relatively recently emerged to let scientists do that is ancient DNA. It's amazing that any DNA is preserved at all in these Neanderthal bones, especially the ones collected well before scientists had any idea that this would ever be possible. So they certainly weren't being careful with contamination.

And so the ancient DNA, when you compare the Neanderthal genome to the Homo sapiens genome, you can see that most Homo sapiens today carry a small but significant percentage of Neanderthal genes.

And that of course means that our species, what we'd always conceived of a separate species, actually we had babies together, those babies could have their own babies, and they did probably several times over the course of many meetings in many areas.

It didn't happen all the time. But it happened often enough to leave this genetic impression of these ancient cousins and our own relationship with them.

And I started thinking about: well, what would that mean for this extinction hypothesis? I think you can make an argument that they didn't really go extinct if their genomes are surviving within us.

But it also just really expanded my mind about not only what Neanderthals were capable of, but what Homo sapiens were capable of that maybe we didn't arrive as this violent conquering apocalyptic force.

And maybe this was more about community and collaboration and new relationships and new kinds of families.

And, as all of this was happening, the climate was really unstable, especially in Western Europe.

And so it would have been a hard time for anyone to survive, like Neanderthals, Homo sapiens, whoever else might have been around.

And so I just started to think, well, why don't we try to see this from a new perspective and see people cooperating in the face of a really challenging time and succeeding and working together and moving forward into the future together.

And I just thought that was a much more exciting and welcoming story about the kind of foundational apocalypse of our species.

Yes. And it really sets a tone, I think, for the rest of the book, although not every society is able to deal as successfully with apocalypse.

So you mentioned the Great Drowning. This is linked, I think, to the worldwide myths of the flood. And you talk about a number of different places, but I'd like you to talk about the Australian aborigines, because they are the only human population that is, or human civilization, let's say, that is still alive, is still contemporary, and experienced that. So they remember it.

Yeah, exactly. So there's myths from all around the coast of Australia of lands being drowned. And, you know, in some ways, these myths are sort of similar to noNoah's Flood or the myth in Gilgamesh, where Noah's Flood came from.

And, you know, like lots of, lots of cultures, as you say, all over the world have these drowning, these flood myths and these great drowning myths, which, you know, I think you can, it's sort of unprovable or not whether those are, you know, long term cultural memories of this event.

But what makes the Australian stories different is that they're really about specific places and landscapes. And, it’s how this island was created. What's underneath this part of the ocean? Like, what did the Great Barrier Reef used to be?

And those places are known to really have existed; it's not kind of an abstract flood myth. It's a myth about this particular landscape transforming.

And these are all over the place. And they're different. And sometimes it's about how the human being stopped the flood. Sometimes it's about kind of mythological experience that caused the flood.

And so, you know, it's a diversity of memories.

But what links them is that this is about specific landscapes that disappeared under the rising waters.

And I think what's also interesting, and what's kind of helped me think through some of the larger ideas in the book even is that, for the Australian populations that experience this, these are part of the creation myth, not like an apocalyptic ending.

And we have that sense with Noah's Flood. We get that sense that one world ended and another began. That's the cycle of time in a lot of myths around the world.

But with the Aboriginal Australian stories, they still feel very connected to these landscapes, they understand what used to be there, and they see themselves as still kind of the caretakers, responsible in some ways for these lands that were lost and that, and so, what does loss mean, even if you still understand those lands to exist in some way, and you still understand yourself to be connected to them?

And I think, for me trying to be able to see what I think in my own cultural experience, and certainly in our current perception of sea level rise as only a tragedy that we must do everything to stop and not as something that creates a new kind of relationship with the land, a new kind of home, a new kind of responsibility, a new kind of memory.

That was all really, really important to me to—and I don't think I'll ever understand it as well as the original communities do, of course—but being able to see an apocalypse that I thought I understood. I thought there was only kind of one way to understand it, and seeing that there was actually many ways to understand it was really inspiring to me.

Yeah, that's really a positive example. Then you also have, this is a little different, but this is also climactic change, as I think are all of the stories in this book: The Santa Valley in Peru, and the changes in El Niño. It’s interesting because I watched a National Geographic, I think it's called the Lost Cities series, and they go to Peru as well, a different part of Peru, but on the coast. Maybe it is the Santa Valley, I don't know. They're talking about the same thing, but about a thousand years in the future from the time that you do it. So this was an ongoing thing.

Talk about the changes in El Niño, the advent of El Niño, and how the coastal people of Peru responded to that crisis.

Yeah, this was one of the most interesting parts of the book for me because I really had not heard about it until I started researching the book.

And so basically, El Niño…We're all familiar with the term and know what happens to our own particular areas during an El Niño year.

But what causes it is that normally the ocean off the Peruvian coast is very cold, and during El Niño years, the current turns over and becomes warm for a few weeks or months. And that precipitates climatic disruptions all over the world, from California to Australia.

But in Peru, what it does is this. It's a really dry desert. You're trapped between the Andes Mountains and this really cold ocean. The humidity from the Amazon can't get over the mountains. Nothing is evaporating from the really cold ocean. So it doesn't rain at all.

The only really source of water are these rivers that come down from the glaciers on top of the Andes. And those valleys are tremendously fertile, but they're surrounded by desert and they're not fueled by rain.

And during an El Niño year, the ocean becomes warm, much more water can evaporate, and so you get a lot of rain, like even a lot of rain compared to no rain, you know? …These are torrential floods.

I looked in 2017, there was one. And it's not something people can easily survive. Even today, these mudslides can just wash through whole cities and leave [them] completely destroyed.

But that is not something that always has happened. The very deep history of El Niño is still a little unclear, but scientists can see from climatic records, in ice cores and stalagmites and stalactites and caves, as well as the species of shellfish that they find in Peruvian archaeological sites. They can see this shift from permanently warm water to the cold water that we know today.

And so you can only get El Niño once you have the cold water. And so they can see that, happening around 5,800 years ago, and for the first time—and it was a little less frequent then, so it would have happened once or twice a century…I thought a lot about our experience today of climate grief and this feeling of ecological disruption, like these environments or weather patterns that we thought we knew and were familiar with, and in some sense could trust, betraying you and becoming something completely different.

And I think that's something that the people of these valleys on the coast of Peru would have felt very acutely as because they were very in touch with their environments as any hunter-gathering fishing society would be.

So I thought, when El Niño started, we would think—you know, we're experiencing it now—we think, God, these repeated natural disasters, this rise of uncertainty, rise of unpredictability, betrayal of our environment. All of these things we assume would lead to kind of the breakdown of complex societies. And that's what people who are building prepper bunkers are worried about today, right?

And so it’s like we have this instinct that repeated natural disasters would make it really hard to come together and will in fact destroy a society…But what you see in Peru that I thought was just so fascinating is that once El Niño happens, you really see people coming together and working together in new ways that they had never before.

So you see the birth of this one particular monumental pyramid, which is one of the very oldest in Peru that's actually built with the mud left behind by repeated El Niños in this wetland that didn't exist before El Niño started happening.

And, as you reach so far back in time with societies that didn't leave behind written words explaining exactly what they were thinking, it all has to be a little speculative. However, I think it's undeniable that the birth of El Niño did not keep societies living in small groups, not communicating with each other, not working together.

And in fact, it may have made it possible for people to start conceiving of themselves as some larger groups wanting to and needing to work together to interact with nature in a new way, wanting to organize themselves.

I hypothesize that as one valley would be flooded out, you'd have to evacuate to another and people would have been meeting each other and moving around all over the place.

And I think something that we see in modern disasters is that those communities that form after disasters are very strong and it can be a really positive experience for survivors to connect in the aftermath and talk about what they've been through, try to help each other.

The instinct for helping after a disaster is so much stronger than the instinct for isolating and running away.

And I think that that dynamism, both environmental and social, in the aftermath of these repeated disasters really could have had something to do with the emergence of the complex societies that we see, like the ones we live in today.

So in that case, a less complex society became more complex in response. But you also talk about…examples of how complexity actually makes us more vulnerable, and I think that's very true of us today.

So talk about the interaction between complexity and how those complex systems can make societies more vulnerable to apocalypses. One example is the old kingdom of Egypt. So maybe talk about that first.

So social complexity is basically, as I said before, this idea that people could have different kinds of lives and do different kinds of jobs in a society and everything kind of interlocks into this larger structure.

But the price of societal complexity is often, if not always, inequality. So some people will have more political power than others. Some people might have more economic resources. It depends; it's obviously a spectrum. It's not a binary one or the other. But when a society becomes more and more complex, it also tends to become more and more unequal. And the scaffolding holding it all together tends to become more and more brittle.

And one of the things that I saw in this book is that apocalypses really come for society's weak points, you know? And I think a weak point of the El Nino societies, you could argue, is their isolation and atomization, right? And it was hard to deal with the aftermath of apocalypse if you were living in too small of a group. And so you want to come together into something bigger and stronger.

But when an apocalypse hits a very, very complex society such as Old Kingdom Egypt, which was one of the first unified states in the whole world ever, and one of the first societies to reach that level of complexity, the apocalypse is going to come for the weak points in complex societies too.

And often that weak point is inequality.

So in the case of the Old Kingdom Egypt, it was tremendously complex and very early. This is the age of the Great Pyramids, the divine kings ruling over everything and the economy was based around this idea of balance, which arose from the environment of the Nile, which depended on these cycles of flood and farming and this tremendously fertile river valley.

And so the part of Egypt that was in this fertile river valley would produce a huge amount of agriculture, wheat, barley, et cetera, and be able to store it, you'd have a unified state led by a divine king kind of in charge of doing those taxes, redistributing the goods to people who needed them.

The people in the river delta were farming animals to send mostly to the pyramid fields in Giza.

And it was all just so complicated, so complex, and really defined by these very rigid social roles that people were—I don't think that they would have felt that they were being forced to inhabit them because …not everybody has throughout history had this American idea of individual liberty being the maximum value and the most important thing in your life, and not everybody has it today. And so people in ancient Egypt certainly wouldn't have been coming at this sense of social complexity or these interlocking rungs of inequality as something that was necessarily bad or unpleasant for them. But it was just the way things were, and they didn't have a lot of power to change it or to get out of it.

And when, as you say, so many of these stories have to do with climate change, there was an unprecedented drought in Egypt, and in fact, in many parts of the world at the time, the climate changed. And the Nile floods were very, very low for at least several years.

And that led to the unified state and the divine king really not being able to fulfill its duties anymore. If there's not a surplus being produced by the farmers, the king has nothing to tax, he has nothing to redistribute. The people themselves say, well, then why are we supporting you? You're not upholding your end of the bargain, why should we uphold ours?

And the unified state of ancient Egypt fractures into many kind of independent city states, regions, and there's undoubtedly some violence and war between them.

But there's also this real flourishing of creativity and even economic resources now that everything isn't flowing to the capital, to the king, and he gets to decide how much the rest of everything people get.

You can see in the forms of pottery that they're producing how much resources regular people had to put to their own tombs. Rather than having to go do labor service to build the king's tomb, they could invest in their own tombs and they get a lot more beautiful and interesting and survived for 4,000 years for archaeologists to find them.

You have a kind of a growth of a middle class for the first time.

Yeah, I think that's certainly how we would see it now, you know, and that really never goes away.

This power that the provinces have—society isn't so stratified between just the people at the top and just the people at the bottom. There's a whole range in the middle and afterwards that, Egypt does reunify after about 150 years, but the ideology of kingship really changes and instead of being just a divine right that everybody has to respect and that defines the contours of everybody else's life, the king really has to listen to people, justify his rulership. I mean, it's still a very, very, very strict monarchy, but the ideology of what a king's responsibilities are really changes and does become much more responsive.

And I think that certainly can be seen as a response to this collapse period where you don't just have to have a king because you have one, you have a king because he makes your life better. And people knew that their lives could be better without a king now. So like you really have to make the case after this collapse period.

And Lizzie Wade, in Apocalypse, How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures, you talk about two contrasting responses to apocalypse in what is now Mexico.

Now you live in Mexico City. On the one hand, you talk about the collapse of the classic Mayan society. And on the other hand, there's a collapse of Aztec society as a result of the brutal colonization of the Spanish.

What are the differences in response to the collapse in these two cases and why?

So the classic Maya society is quite similar to what we just talked about with Egypt, you know, the classic Maya, which left behind the many of the cities that we know today that we go to visit, like Tikal, Calakmul, even Chichen Itza, which is a little later and more complicated, but these are the products of the classic Maya civilization.

It wasn't unified the way that Egypt was; they were all kind of separate city-states vying for power and trade routes and things like that, but they were ruled by defined kings and everything was very stratified, very unequal.

And the reason that we know so much about the classic Maya is because these kings had their histories carved into stone by artisans, and that all disappears with the collapse of the classic Maya, which again coincides with a big drought, or multiple cycles of drought, over the course of a few centuries.

So in some senses, it's quite similar with what I described happening in Egypt. It’s this defined monarchy system that can no longer justify itself in a time of environmental crisis, [which] collapses into smaller communities, more equal communities.

And unlike in Egypt, when the Maya, especially in Yucatan, which is the northern part of the Maya world, decide to build cities again, they don't go back to this defined kingship model.

It's more of confederacies of powerful families. Even Chichen Itza is arguably like that at the end of the collapse. And power is more shared.

It's not equal in the way that we would think about it today. But it's certainly more complicated and collective than just like a divine king receiving messages from the ancestors and the gods and telling everyone else what to do, right?

And that story gets lost when we see the Maya world as just these abandoned cities in the jungle, when really what happened afterwards was extremely exciting and really something new in the Maya conception of who they were and what a society is for and how they wanted to live. And they're still here today. There's millions of Maya people today.

Even in the case of the Aztec Empire, who were led by a group of people called the Mexica, who are the founders of what is today Mexico City, they're doing great before the Spanish arrived. Tenochtitlan is the capital, today Mexico City.

It's this incredible metropolis built on an island in a lake with floating farms and intensive infrastructure and technology for managing water, both controlling floodwaters that were inevitable but manageable under the system of living with the lake and living with the environment and bringing in drinking water.

It was like everybody, all the Europeans who come and see Tenochtitlan in its glory talk about how clean it is and how well organized and how beautiful, and it's like a dream.

And if I could travel back in time to any time period, it would certainly be like 1490 Mexico City or Tenochtitlan to see it.

And the Spanish arrive, or the Europeans arrive, and there's this very brutal—well, actually there's quite a long time of negotiation and coexistence.

The conquistadors actually lived in Tenochtitlan for about eight months, which I think is a piece of the story that's often forgotten, along with another piece of the story, which is that the Aztec Empire was an empire, there was a lot of resistance to its rule. And…we’ve absorbed this story that like, oh, 100 Spaniards were able to topple the Aztec Empire of hundreds of thousands, when really it was the hundreds of thousands of indigenous warriors from the places that had always resisted Tenochtitlan's rule, that allied with the Spaniards and really made this possible.

But I think, you know, as within any story of apocalypse, it's just more complicated than we had imagined, than we tend to imagine today, like none of these outcomes were inevitable.

People were really like making choices without knowing the end of the story. Decisions that might seem inexplicable to us today, like indigenous societies allying with the Spaniards made perfect sense in the political landscape of indigenous history at the time, and trying to add back some of that complexity to that story was really important to me.

But I think the main difference between the apocalypse of the conquista and resulting colonialism and the apocalypse of the classic Maya for me, was that the apocalypse of colonialism prohibited recovery.

And a lot of the reinvention of an apocalypse happens in that recovery period, as we talked about with El Nino, people coming together in the aftermath and figuring out who they needed to be now to face this environment that had changed out from under them, or the classic Maya saying, oh, well, that form of organized society really didn't work when things got bad. What should we try next?

And with colonialism, you know, this outside ideology and systems were imposed on these lands and people who had experienced, you know, a devastating and traumatic loss. People weren't really able to come together in the rubble and figure out, okay, that happened. What happens next? It just never ended and the wounds were never able to heal. And we're still living in that aftermath today.

Well, to make a point even sharper, you talked about how the Aztecs were able to more or less satisfactorily control their water supply, whereas when the Spaniards came in and they built their colonial Mexico City on top of Tenochtitlan, they understood absolutely nothing about controlling the water supply.

And as a consequence of that and our now anthropogenic climate change, Mexico City faces incredibly severe crises of water that might have been alleviated if they had not wiped away the indigenous knowledge.

Yeah, exactly. That was one of the things that really unlocked my thinking about the long-term impact of apocalypses and especially seeing colonialism as an apocalypse.

One of the ideologies that Europeans imposed that was really developing at this time as Caribbean islands were turned into sugar plantations fueled by enslaved African labor, they were sort of expanding around the world and thinking, oh, we'll just bring our way of life to these new places.

And one piece of that ideology was this idea that you could and should control your environment instead of working with your environment.

And so during the war for Tenochtitlan, much of the water infrastructure was purposely destroyed to cut off drinking water to the city, canals were filled in to make it easier for the Spaniards to use horses in these battles…you have to think of it as like a naval battle almost.

And so, where a lot of the Spaniards may have had an advantage in kind of an open battlefield warfare situation with a horse, but if all the streets in your city are actually full of water, horses are really hard to manage and it doesn't really do you any good.

You have to create the kind of landscape that's going to allow you to take advantage of your own technology.

And so they filled in a lot of the canals, bringing these animals, like not only horses, but the sheep and cows and goats kind of trampled these very delicate, well-managed islands, farms.

So, you know, a hundred years after the conquest or so, people, you know, everyone looked around and was like, why is this flooding every 20 years?

Like this is, this is devastating.

And the colonial mindset and the European mindset was just like, well, we'll just get rid of the water. The water is not doing us any good. We need to get rid of it.

So there is this huge, huge, huge infrastructure effort, because Mexico city is in high mountains and kind of a valley in high mountains. So you have to like get the water out of the mountains, put it into a river and take it hundreds of miles away to one of the oceans.

So it's a tremendous infrastructure project. And in some ways it's still happening. We're still constructing drainage canals. We're still insisting on the idea that the only solution to this problem is to get rid of the water.

And as a result, the groundwater that we're supposed to have is not being replenished. is We're pumping it all out to the city sinking, which also makes the drainage harder because you have to pump it further, like higher up against gravity.

So the city is sinking and every time it rains, the lake that's supposed to be here insists on filling back up. Just two nights ago, there was the first flood of the year, and it's been happening for 400 years.

And somehow every year we all say, well, I guess that's just the way it has to be. It's just a bad place to have a city, when really the problem was a colonial ideology. It was the conquest. It was the lack of imagination that this kind of narrative of progress and environmental domination imposes on us.

And so now let's think about today. You do a little bit of writing about that. In fact, it's interesting because you imagine some of where we're going. For example, you imagine the breakup of the United States, California or New York City might be independent entities, or we could evolve in city states.

I actually have had a strong feeling for a long time that this country is going to break up in the not too distant future. I don't mean like next year, but very possibly by the end of the century. And I hadn't heard anybody else articulate that until I read it in your book.

So what's your message for us? What do we need to do to prepare ourselves for the best transformation possible in the apocalypse that we are now undergoing?

I think for me, it's not that I hope for the breakup of the United States, but I think looking back on 40,000 years of human history, things don't last forever and political entities are fragile.

The more complex the society gets, the more brittle and prone to the effects of apocalypse it becomes. And I think we should be doing everything we can to slow and maybe even stop climate change.

But the reality is, with what the carbon we've already released into the atmosphere, we've got at least a century of climate change coming our way already, even if we stopped everything tomorrow.

And I think we have to really try to move beyond the fear of what kind of changes that could lead to.

And something that I thought about a lot with societal collapse in particular, which again doesn't mean that everyone descends into a dark age of person against person and you have to retreat into a family bunker—a lot of the places that we know will still exist, they just might not be connected to each other in the same political and economic structures that we have now. New communities could form out of these apocalypses, like we talked about in El Nino. It's just going to be a very dynamic time.

And I think for me, part of a lesson that I learned writing the book, because when I thought about, okay, what are the kinds of apocalypse I want to talk about, like climate change, the plagues, societal collapse, that's a big one, right? And that's one that archaeologists are obsessed with studying, and for good reason. What kind of collapse? Oh, societal collapse…So there's a lot of things on the table for us.

But what I learned when researching societal collapse is that societal collapse is often not an apocalypse in and of itself. It's the reaction to, and often kind of solution to, other kinds of apocalypses.

So as we talked about with Egypt and the classic Maya, when these environmental changes happened and maybe the political situation had become quite fragile and the kings were not able to keep up their end of the bargain, people looked around and said, well, this isn't working for us anymore.

And bringing to an end a type of society that isn't working for the new world that's emerging is not necessarily a bad thing. That's called adaptation, right?

And that can be full of exciting new opportunities, both for political imagination, new local communities forming…

I think we all felt this in the shocks of the early COVID pandemic, the fact that the global supply chains were in fact much more fragile and could grind to a halt much quicker than we ever imagined or that I ever imagined for sure, and saying, well, maybe we don't want to put ourselves at risk like that.

Maybe there are other ways to organize yourselves and other ways to live.

And again, I'm not saying everyone needs to build their prepper bunker and buy guns. Actually, I think that's the worst thing you could possibly do.

What you need to do is be thinking about knowing your neighbors, forming communities. I do think kind of local sufficiency is important to think about, but that doesn't mean us against them. It doesn't mean every man for himself. It means that there's going to be a lot of new ways to organize ourselves.

There's just so many ways societies can look like, and even getting to explore just a handful of them by writing about archaeology is like, we could do anything.

It's all within our imaginations and within our power, and I think apocalypses can unleash a lot of that energy, and especially it really shakes the society and shakes the people within it to say like, oh, is this really what we want to do?

And I think answering that question with saying, no, this isn't what we want to do. This isn't how we want to live, and that leading to pretty radical societal transformations. That may be a loss, but it doesn't have to be a tragedy.

Well, that's wonderful, and it's why I just love this book. It's filled with so much fascinating information, but the perspective of it is one that is really so inspiring, Apocalypse, How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures. Lizzie Wade, it's just been great to talk with you.

Thank you so much for having me. This has been wonderful.