Lizzie Wade is an award-winning science journalist and correspondent for the prestigious journal Science. She covers anthropology, archeology, and Latin America. Her work has appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, Slate, the New York Times, Aeon, Smithsonian, and Archaeology.
What’s the big idea?
In Apocalypse, the term itself is understood as a rapid, collective loss that fundamentally changes a society’s way of life and sense of identity. Viewed as an ending of existence as we know it, rather than an end of all existence period, helps reframe such terrifying times of upheaval as our greatest opportunities for growth and improvement. Human history shows that our species has approached and retreated from the brink of annihilation time and again, offering inspiring wisdom and tales of resilience that should empower the modern reader to seize our turbulent moment by the horns.
Below, Lizzie shares five key insights from her new book, Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures. Listen to the audio version—read by Lizzie herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. We’ve been here before.
Life in the 2020s started out scary, and it’s only getting more terrifying. The decade began with the worst pandemic in a century, upending our lives, health, and politics in ways we’re only beginning to understand. Climate disasters that may have seemed like distant possibilities are now upon us, no matter who we are or where we live. Political and economic systems that once seemed durable, even natural, are proving to be frighteningly fragile, cracking under the weight of an increasingly apocalyptic world.
As the world we knew comes to an end, it’s easy to feel alone. But by spending time with archaeologists, I learned that cataclysms like climate change, societal collapse, global pandemics, total war, and even human extinction are not uniquely modern problems. Our ancestors experienced all those apocalypses. More importantly, they survived them all. We are the heirs of a long history of resilience, adaptation, and creativity that has already seen countless human beings through the worst of times. Our ancestors have so much to teach us about our future, if we can cast off our assumptions and learn how to listen to their stories.
2. Community and collaboration are keys to survival.
Around 47,000 years ago, humans in northern Europe found themselves facing a jumpy and unstable climate. Conditions swung between cold and warm and back again relatively quickly. Those who ventured out to new lands during warm periods could find themselves cut off from food, resources, and other communities when the cold suddenly returned. The animals they hunted started dying or migrating, and humans struggled to continually adapt to an environment they could no longer trust or predict. These humans were Neanderthals, and they would soon find themselves confronting another challenge: the arrival of Others who looked and lived just enough like them to rely on the same resources.
“Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were not competitors and enemies, nor victors and victims—or at least, not only those things.”
Early paleoanthropologists believed that what happened next was the apocalypse that set it all in motion. They believed those Others, Homo sapiens, eliminated Neanderthals through violence, competition, and domination, in a process that looked suspiciously like 19th-century colonial genocides. But 21st-century research has revealed that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were not competitors and enemies, nor victors and victims—or at least, not only those things. By sequencing the Neanderthal genome, paleogeneticists were able to find pieces of it in almost every person alive today. That proved that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had children together, in many places and at many times, and that those children would go on to have their own children, so successfully that our shared ancestry spread around the world. Neanderthals became us, and we also became them. We survived, together.
3. Apocalypses destroy old worlds, but they also create new ones.
I define apocalypse as a rapid, collective loss that fundamentally changes a society’s way of life and sense of identity. An isolated drought might make for a few bad harvests and some tough years, but it won’t force society to give up on farming entirely. A drought that lasts for decades, however, might do that. It could also lead to the overthrow or disintegration of the government that failed to prevent such a crisis. In this manner, environmental apocalypse spurs a political one in a feedback loop of destruction.
That’s what happened in ancient Egypt 4,200 years ago, when catastrophically low Nile floods hit during and just after the reign of a weak and ineffective king. The construction of grand monuments like the pyramids abruptly stopped, provinces broke away from royal rule, and scribes wrote of an upside-down world so full of suffering that people began committing suicide by crocodile. Old Kingdom Egypt had been unified for 800 years until this apocalypse tore it apart.
But in destroying the Egyptian state, this apocalypse also destroyed the strict social and economic hierarchy that had governed and constrained Egyptian lives for centuries. Wealth that had been concentrated in the capital flowed to newly independent provinces, and new leaders arose who boasted of taking care of their followers during the hardest of times, rather than extracting labor and resources from them as the pharaoh had done. Archaeological excavations reveal that commoners not only survived but also thrived during Egypt’s drought and state collapse. It was the elites of the old order who suffered most in the new, more equal world created by the apocalypse. And it is their perspective that written history is preserved and propagated, to the detriment of all our imaginations.
4. We already live in a postapocalyptic world.
Most of us have been taught to see human history as a march of inevitable technological, political, and cultural progress. We’ve been told that the world we live in today is the pinnacle of that progress, and any disruption to it is a terrifying tragedy. As we face our own apocalypses, it’s easy to feel that we have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
“These apocalypses connected the entire planet for the first time, sparking new identities, hierarchies, and ideas.”
But archaeology can help us see that the modern world is already postapocalyptic. It was built from the rubble of the twin apocalypses of colonialism and slavery. These apocalypses connected the entire planet for the first time, sparking new identities, hierarchies, and ideas, including capitalism and consumerism. They also resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, the enslavement of millions more, and the attempted destruction of ancient communities and cultures. Unlike the apocalypse that destroyed, but also remade, Old Kingdom Egypt, colonialism and slavery precluded the conditions necessary for recovery. Through centuries of unchecked resource extraction, they created a world that’s dangerous for all of us who inhabit it—and they continue to ensure our present and future apocalypses will transform into the worst versions of themselves.
5. Apocalypses are the best chance societies have for change.
The next apocalypse is no longer a specter on the horizon. It is here, no matter how much we wish we could delay or deny it. But that doesn’t mean we’re doomed to the worst-case scenario. It means that this is our moment. This is our chance to harness the transformative energy of apocalypse to build a new, different, and better world. We’ve misunderstood apocalypses as interruptions in the human story, unfortunate deviations from the path of progress and growth we’re supposed to be on. But in my research, I’ve learned that apocalypses are the human story. Each and every one was a vital turning point that led to everything that came after, for better and for worse. Our apocalypse will be, too.
Like it not, our world is changing. If we can move beyond denial and fear and look straight at the apocalypse, we have the chance to participate in, and even guide, our own transformations. In ancient Greek, the word “apocalypse” means “the unveiling.” Apocalypses are moments when we can see the truth of what our society is and what it could become. The world we thought we lived in is over. What world do we want to build next?
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