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Beyond Catastrophe: How Ancient Societies Thrived Through Change

• Michele McAloon

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What if apocalypse doesn't mean the end of everything, but rather a revelation of new possibilities? Archaeologist Lizzie Wade turns our understanding of catastrophe upside down in this eye-opening conversation about how ancient societies transformed through crisis.

Speaking from Mexico City, Wade takes us on a global journey through civilizations that faced devastating challenges yet emerged transformed. She dismantles our preconceptions about Neanderthals, revealing not brutish cave-dwellers but communities capable of care and connection—even interbreeding with our ancestors during climate instability. The DNA evidence speaks volumes: almost all modern humans carry about 2% Neanderthal ancestry, suggesting cooperation rather than conquest.

The pattern continues across time and space. When Egypt's Old Kingdom collapsed amid severe drought around 4,200 years ago, elite texts described apocalyptic horror. Yet archaeological evidence from ordinary villages shows increased creativity, religious innovation, and more broadly distributed resources. Similarly, the Black Death decimated Europe's population but ultimately improved living conditions for survivors despite elites' desperate attempts to preserve feudal hierarchies. These historical patterns have striking parallels to our experience with COVID-19, suggesting we're still just beginning to understand the pandemic's long-term social effects.

Wade's most powerful insight may be about who gets to tell these stories. Written records typically come from those with power and privilege, while archaeology reveals a more complete picture by examining the lived experience of ordinary people. This perspective shift is especially crucial when considering colonial narratives like the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, which wasn't the inevitable triumph of "superior" civilization that European accounts depicted.

As we face climate change and other global challenges, Wade's research offers profound hope. Throughout human history, apocalypse has never meant extinction but transformation. The question isn't whether we'll survive, but what kind of society we'll create in response to crisis. What holds us back isn't technological limitations but fear of change—particularly from those benefiting most from existing systems. Are we brave enough to imagine entirely new possibilities?

Michele McAloon:

Hi, you're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michele McAloon. Okay, so I've done two books about hope. My last episode was by Dorian Linskey Everything Must Go the Stories we Tell About the End of the World, and the interview today I have is Apocalypse how Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures, and it's by Lizzie Wade. And the reason why I've chosen these two books is because we need a message about hope and although the end of the world in Apocalypse may sound counterintuitive, I do really think the message of these books is you know what? Not yet, and we can actually transform ourselves out of catastrophic change. So I know there's a lot of dark news in the world these days and I hopefully, with these books and listening to these interviews, that you can see that you know what I think. Pope John Paul II's words of advice be not afraid. Coming from Jesus Christ, our Lord, I think that is words that we can use both in a religious context and a secular context. If you'd like to know more about me, go to my website at bookcluescom and happy reading, happy listening, keep talking to each other. God bless, welcome.

Michele McAloon:

We have a very interesting book. I know I always say very interesting book, but I tell you, all my books are like. You know who's my favorite child. But this is a very good book. It is called Apocalypse how Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures, and it's written by Lizzie Wade. Ms Wade is a contributing correspondent for science, focusing on archaeology and anthropology. Her writing has appeared in Wired, the New York Times, archaeology, aeon, slate and among many others, and she's actually coming to me from Mexico City. She's a native of Los Angeles and I think this is the first time I've ever interviewed anybody from Mexico, so I'm really happy about that.

Lizzie Wade:

Welcome, lizzie. Thank you so much. It's a delight to be here.

Michele McAloon:

Oh well, we're delighted to have you. Okay, so this book is actually. It has a lot of different strands, but one of the things that I found really fascinating about this book was archaeology and how archaeology is used, and actually archaeology is kind of the backbone of the book. What is archaeology? Can you explain that? What is?

Lizzie Wade:

archaeology? Can you explain that Great question? Yeah, I think a lot of us learn about archaeology from Indiana Jones and you know, yeah, mostly Indiana Jones, right too, mostly past cultures, although you can apply it in interesting ways to cultures that are within the last few decades even, or current cultures today, like, there's some really interesting work that applies kind of archaeological analysis to the International Space Station, for example, kind of seeing how space is organized and how the things in our lives present our lives and also influence our lives in turn. It really made me think. Having reported on archaeology for so long really makes me think about all this stuff I own differently and what you could learn from it if you were looking at it 500 years in the future.

Michele McAloon:

Oh, absolutely. And you brought up a point where archaeologists have looked at COVID now and what was the material left behind COVID? And it's funny because I've thought about that, because you still see the signs. Keep your distance right, wash your hands, all of those. Keep washing your hands folks. But all of these signs that are now kind of quaint at this period and that really is, I mean, that's a trace of who we were and of who we are and what we went through.

Lizzie Wade:

Thought a lot about when, especially when rapid tests started to come out and become available like 2021 for me anyway. You know, I just thought a lot so much about, like the layer of those little plastic rectangles that archaeologists are going to find. It's like almost going to be as diagnostic as a volcanic eruption. Those things appear and you're like, oh it's 2021.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, you still see a lot of masks Just like as detritus around the world.

Lizzie Wade:

I mean it's just, it is it's crazy it really is, and because so much is made of plastic, it's going to last for a long time. So future archaeologists are definitely going to find it.

Michele McAloon:

A millennium, right? Okay, so let's get to the word that I find very interesting too is apocalypse. Because you're right, embracing doesn't mean resigning ourselves to the worst-case scenario or giving up the idea of progress. Destruction can be a gateway to that progress. So what is?

Lizzie Wade:

an apocalypse, that of intertwining or ongoing problems, crises. That was a word that came up for me a lot, especially going into COVID, which is when I started writing the book really in earnest, and I also love this sense of the word. That comes from the ancient Greek. That means kind of revelation or unveiling, and sort of this moment where you can see truths that were previously hidden to you, often because of what the disaster has revealed.

Lizzie Wade:

And so for me, I define apocalypse, combine all those definitions and I define it as like a rapid collective loss that transforms a society's way of life and sense of identity, and I think it has to be relatively quick, at least within changes are happening within collective memory. So, like grandparents to grandchildren, it has to be relatively quick, at least within changes are happening within collective memory. So, like grandparents to grandchildren, it has to be collective. It can't just be like even the eruption of Pompeii. At Pompeii, for example, was destroyed Pompeii obviously and led to many other the people there either dying or having to move and restart their lives, and it was clearly a huge catastrophe and would have had ripple effects, but it didn't take down the Roman Empire. My version of apocalypse are events that did take down societies. I really try to think of them as these moments where really big changes are possible and often necessary.

Michele McAloon:

Let me ask you a question Could artificial intelligence as its onset? Could that be apocalyptic? So can technological change in itself be apocalyptic? Does apocalypse have to be catastrophic? Let's put it that way.

Lizzie Wade:

I think no, I think it doesn't have to be catastrophic or a lot of things in my book. We interpret them as catastrophic looking back on them in the archaeological record, because we can see these big changes and losses and political realignments, for example, and we interpret that as, yeah, something was lost or ended. But I think examining different kinds of archaeological evidence, especially from more regular people, often reveals that these events weren't necessarily catastrophes or they weren't catastrophes for everyone. I thought about artificial intelligence. I think we're too early in the process to really for me to feel comfortable making any predictions, like especially since I spend so much time thinking about the past and I also think a lot of these apocalypses are. I say they have to be fast, but I also think it's a little hard to tell when you're living through one, especially at the beginning.

Michele McAloon:

And because these changes you know, you're not sure if they're going to last, You're not sure no-transcript versus Neanderthals and that's actually fascinating because you have to break through a lot of myths that Neanderthals were not. These brutish people Explain a little bit to this. This is really fascinating. I never really kind of thought of it that way.

Lizzie Wade:

Thank you. Yeah, neanderthals were sort of the apocalypse that the time was really interested in categorizing humanity into different groups. For a lot of them these were the racial groups that we still understand today have huge societal effects, and this is when those ideas were really emerging. And not only were these scientists trying to categorize people, they were trying to place them in a hierarchy. And Neanderthals they found this other category of human with a different shaped skull than Homo sapiens. This is like where a lot of the race, science, energy was going like looking at different shapes of skulls. So they said, oh look, this has a different shape of skull. It must have been inferior to who we are now. That sort of message got reinforced.

Lizzie Wade:

There was like a pretty famous Neanderthal skeleton discovered in the early 20th century that was kind of hunched over and like twisted and wouldn't have been able to walk that well and that was very influential in our you know, in the public and scientific understanding of who Neanderthals were. But it turns out that that particular skeleton was quite an old man with arthritis and that actually speaks to a level of care and longevity in Neanderthals that like if they really were these kind of brutish creatures without a lot of empathy or ability to plan ahead or ability to work together in groups, talk to each other. Probably an old man with a disability would not have survived as long as he did right, like some people were taking care of him. In recent years, like in the last 15 years or so, we found through the study of ancient DNA that Neanderthal DNA is actually in most people in the world. Today we all carry about 2% of Neanderthal ancestry, which is not significant enough to say that Neanderthals still exist as they once did.

Lizzie Wade:

But to me it really spoke to the possibility that, you know, we were meeting each other, we were forming communities together, we were at least having babies together and those babies had their own babies. You know, on and on and on till us today and I think that possibility that we really loved each other and came together to form new kinds of communities in this period the climate was really unstable, especially in Northern Europe, and it would have been challenging for Neanderthals and Homo sapiens alike, and the way that we survived was really to come together rather than to see each other as enemies or inferiors and superiors, or victors and victims. I just thought we've been trapped with this really dark and possibly incorrect version of this story. It look like if we tried to see this story based on the scientific evidence, as something that allowed all of us to be our best selves, like Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. And what would it look like if we looked at all the apocalypses in my book through that lens?

Michele McAloon:

Well, yeah, because it's interesting, because you said that you know they probably formed social connections over long distances and they had communities and this is what allowed them to probably survive and to intermingle and to mix. I have to apologize to everyone who told me about their me and 23 and their genetic testing, that they were part Neanderthal. I had some dark doubts when you told me that.

Lizzie Wade:

But it's okay, we all are, it's part of who we are. But you also had another, a Denisovan. So you know we found very few bones of them. They were identified just from their genome in a like tiny little piece of a finger bone. I think it's like two, the size of two grains of rice put together. This was at a time when the researchers were trying to find Neanderthal genome. So they tested it and you know it didn't fit either Homo sapiens or Neanderthal, and so there was this new human group that hadn't been discovered.

Lizzie Wade:

People are out there looking. We haven't quite figured out how what they look like. It's possible some bones have been discovered already, but they haven't been conclusively identified as such. The interesting things about the Denisovans is that they really appeared to be very widespread throughout mostly Asia and you know, kind of Eastern Eurasia, and they appear to be really thriving, at least in terms of like what we can see from the genetics kind of population sizes and mixing with human groups like Homo sapiens groups in different areas. They also are not here anymore.

Lizzie Wade:

It's one of the big mysteries of paleoanthropology is what happened, who the Denisovans were and what happened to them, and I think my hope is that we can take what we've learned from our really unfounded prejudices against the Neanderthals and start to ask different questions about the Denisovans, and not starting from the idea that they were somehow destined to go extinct or that Homo sapiens were necessarily were always going to out-compete them, for example. It just seems like the story could be a lot more complicated than that, and we should learn from the mistakes we made about Neanderthals to look at this new big mystery differently.

Michele McAloon:

Your book. That's really kind of your narrative is. You kind of look at ancient peoples and show that they were not unsophisticated, that they responded to their environment, that they made decisions that was the best for themselves, for their children, for their communities, and you really do a nice job of that, of people having to combat things that were out of their control and trying to put them in their control, to try to control their surroundings so that they could flourish. I could probably talk to you for hours because you've got so many interesting things in this book that I hadn't really never read about. I never read about Doggerland, which is up in the North Sea and where they, you said, through oil and gas drilling, salvation, archaeology or constructive archaeology, they were able to actually map out a whole country, a whole sort of civilization in a country. I don't know if it's a civilization, but a country of people.

Lizzie Wade:

Yeah, so Doggerland was what existed in when the sea levels were a lot lower during the last ice age and towards the end of it. You know, the glaciers started melting. The sea level started rising before the glaciers fully melted, there was a lot more land exposed and part of that land was in the North Sea, kind of the southern part connecting kind of eastern England like over to Denmark, and parts pieces of Germany, the Netherlands. Yeah, it's fascinating. During that time in that part of the world anyway, most people were hunter-gatherers. It's hard to find evidence of their lives. They moved around a lot. You know, a wooden house that you live in for a season is much more ephemeral than a huge monumental stone pyramid, for example. So it's hard to find them.

Lizzie Wade:

But it appears that potentially one of the reasons that it's been hard to find them was because people were not really living in the places that we live today. They were living in Doggerland, which is now under the North Sea, and that's because the very process of sea level rise would have created this amazing environment of wetlands and lakes and rivers and coasts and it was very dynamic, which obviously led to it disappearing. Eventually the sea level did rise enough that it disappeared in the 2000 years or so that it existed. It was just an amazing place to live, I think, and people could really adapt even to the changing environments and sort of how they remembered old places and how they related to the rising sea itself.

Lizzie Wade:

There are only beginning to be hints of these cultural adaptations, because it is so hard to do the archaeology, it is hard to find these traces and hard to understand the culture of Daggerland because it is underwater, so the archaeology is really challenging. So you have to either have to do coring, which you have to be very sure where you of. In response to sea level rise today, they've been dredging up sediment from under the sea and like using it to sort of extend beaches and dry land, and so in that sediment you can find things, although it's all mixed up. But yeah, it's a fascinating place and I think it's really. You know, it could hold a lot of clues to how people in the past reacted to an apocalypse that's really similar, in fact exactly the same, as one of the ones we're facing today.

Michele McAloon:

That's interesting because we have climate change today, and I mean, this is in the face of what people had to do when the climate changed, when what they understood was their reality and that reality started to change and how people made those changes. But, as you say, not all the changes were bad. And you, actually you lay out a beautiful story with Egypt, with the Middle Kingdom of Egypt I think it was the Middle Kingdom, the Old Kingdom actually.

Michele McAloon:

The Old Kingdom, how actually it wasn't for the worse, it was actually maybe for the better of people's lives that the old god king fell and communities were able to come up, and this was all in response to environmental change, which I think is really interesting.

Lizzie Wade:

Yeah, so there was a very devastating drought. Ancient Egypt depended on these Nile floods every year and it made the river valley along the Nile extremely fertile. You could produce these huge surpluses of wheat and barley, which made basically a state formation that could tax those surpluses and sort of concentrate resources and redistribute it in various ways. And you know that kind of balance and unification was the driving ideological force behind the Old Kingdom. As far as we can tell from the documents and also from the monuments they built, I think a quarter of the Old Kingdom's economy was supported at any given time by building monuments like the pyramids. I mean they were huge state projects that depended on amazing coordination of people and resources. But kind of the reason behind that and the price of that was this really strict social and economic hierarchy. And so when the flood started to fail around 4,200 years ago, you know that hierarchy started to break down and we have documents from people who were once kind of at the top of that hierarchy being like, oh my God, we've never seen anything like this. It's a horrible disaster. The world is upside down. People are walking into the Nile and committing suicide by crocodile. I mean it's so vivid. These texts are amazing.

Lizzie Wade:

But you know, when you actually look at the archaeology of villages where regular people lived, their lives don't really seem to change that much over that century or so.

Lizzie Wade:

And when you look at kind of examples of what I think we would term today as the middle class although you know, obviously those words aren't totally translatable to a society 4,000 years ago but artisans and people who weren't just doing subsistence farming necessarily, their creativity seems to really have exploded during it's called the first intermediate period after the old kingdom, so it's when the old kingdom broke down.

Lizzie Wade:

So there's so much more. Different kinds of art, different forms of religion really take office when the Osiris cult really explodes in popularity, which is something that we associate heavily with ancient Egypt in general, which of course survived after this period too, and a lot of people like before, for example, only the very rich or the people working directly for them would have tombs that could survive for archaeologists to discover 4,000 years later, like not only the pyramids but tombs around there. And during the first intermediate period, one of the potentially scary things that archaeologists noticed was that there was this explosion in graves, and a lot of archaeologists initially interpreted that as being, oh my God, so many more people are dying.

Lizzie Wade:

This is horrible.

Lizzie Wade:

They must be starving to death from this drought or the violence of a war or whatever.

Lizzie Wade:

But you know, I think another more recent interpretation that I think really deserves a lot of consideration is that, well, there's not necessarily more people dying.

Lizzie Wade:

It's that their tombs were better constructed, more resources were able to be put in them, more art, more of these kind of figurines that people would make that used to be just reserved for the royalty, like a lot of things that used to be reserved only for the nobility during the old kingdom, after the collapse spread to many different kinds of people in society, and I think that really speaks to the possibility. Well, it speaks to the possibilities that collapse can create. If your life is no longer governed by this incredibly strict social hierarchy and economic hierarchy, what becomes possible for you? If you were previously at the top of that hierarchy, your life probably gets worse, but if you weren't, you know it's possible that you don't even notice that much, or your life is getting better, and I think those messages have really been obscured by the people who got to write down their perspectives and our own kind of prejudices and assumptions when we think about what it must be like when a society collapses, so to speak.

Michele McAloon:

Sure, you pick this up too, in two different places too. With the Mayans, once the Mayan culture kind of fell, then they broke down into communities and they just picked up with the ruins. You show that in the Harappa community that people do, people continue to live and continue to make their lives. I would contend that, and very much I work in the shadow of the fallen Roman Empire. I'm a canon lawyer for the Roman Catholic Church. I practice Roman law which is over 2,000 years old. I practice Justinian law, which is over 1,200 years old. It was built in the shadow of fallen Rome and we have a Catholic church that's 1.4 billion. So that is the shadow of the Roman Empire. But there were people that didn't do well and you showed that with the plague, the bubonic plague, and that is really interesting that it hit what 1340s in England, in Europe basically, but they didn't really do well with it.

Lizzie Wade:

No, so the Black Death was I mean, even having lived through something like COVID, which was obviously a huge beyond my comprehension before we lived through it like even the Black Death even remains beyond my what I feel like I can imagine. I mean it was so devastating, so quick. It arrives in Europe around 1348, 1347 earliest, and then by 1351, half of Europe is dead. That's a staggering amount of loss in a really short period of time. But when people were writing about the Black Death at the time which we have a lot of documents from again, you know sort of people in specific social positions, like people in monasteries, people, various governments, but we have a lot of accounts and people were saying like, oh my God, it's worse than Noah's flood. At least that left that family alive. It's just unbelievably catastrophic and the people at the time sort of experienced it, as you know that it didn't discriminate. It hit everyone equally. Everyone was at equal risk.

Lizzie Wade:

But when we look at it through the bones of the people who died and you know modern statistics, all these different kinds of scientific analysis that archaeologists can do they can see that the people who were already at risk through challenges early in their life, like malnutrition, different kinds of physiological stresses which, at the time and even now today, are mostly associated with poverty and inequality, like the society that the Black Death hit, especially in England, while it was all feudal societies, which are inherently extremely unequal.

Lizzie Wade:

And then historians and archaeologists can see that in the decades leading up to the Black Death in England, inequality really increased through various climate changes that maybe weren't as dramatic as Egypt, but did make farming more difficult. It's designed to exploit and intensify that inequality instead of ameliorating it in any way, and so you get the Black Death hitting a society that's already really stratified. Some people have a lot of resources and power and most people don't, and it does seem to be those people who had less or had suffered from poverty and its physiological effects going into the Black Death who seemed to have been hit the hardest when the plague arrived.

Michele McAloon:

I think this actually abodes as a warning. There are things that we need to pay attention to here. After coming up from COVID, you said that they really didn't change their society, they didn't learn from it. They stayed the same rigid structure. So you know, I hate to keep bringing up that old dragon, covid, but you look at it, we're only five years out and I think in many ways we are still reeling economically, socially, politically, culturally. We are still reeling from the effects of COVID. That wasn't. It was deadly for some of the population, but wasn't as massively deadly as the Spanish flu or the bubonic plague, thank goodness. Are we making the same mistakes? I couldn't help but wondering that when I was reading your book.

Lizzie Wade:

Yeah, the resonances are overwhelming. I mean reading these documents from, you know, the English parliament, like I mean it was. 40 years later they were still passing laws trying to get people to go back to work for the wages of 1347, 1348, before the Black Death struck. Because, of course, what happens after the Black Death? You have these devastating losses that really hit you know what. We would consider the working class much harder, but it happened so quickly. And then after that, there's almost no one left to do the work that society really depends on. And this, of course, made me think of essential workers and what kind of work really keeps the society going and how we value those people or not. Immediately after the plague, there was almost no one left to do the work of harvesting the fields, taking care of the animals, maintaining these manners, systems that the wealthy depended on. And again you get these people writing about how, oh my God, society's turned upside down. The social order that we depended on is fracturing.

Lizzie Wade:

But through those cracks in those documents, considering who was writing them, and also by looking at the bioarchaeology, the skeletons of the people who died after the Black Death, people did appear to be healthier in the generations after. Regular people lived longer, they were taller, things like signs of health that you can see in bones. They had fewer of these markers of poverty on their skeletons than the people who died before the Black Death or during the Black Death. And not to minimize the absolute horror of the Black Death for everyone, and especially the people lower on the social and economic ladder who certainly experienced like I mean, they don't have the same words for like psychological trauma that we do, but you can sort of see hints of that in the documents too. I mean it's just imagining. That's probably the most stereotypically apocalyptic apocalypse that we've ever experienced and imagining it is horrifying. But you know, again, it creates these openings in a society that once seemed really rigid. And the people who are sort of devoted to preserving that rigidity and preserving the way things were before, they're passing laws, trying to do that, yeah, for literal decades, like 40 years, which at the time would have been at least two generations, and so they're still trying to tamp down the possibilities and opportunities that the plague unleashed.

Lizzie Wade:

And I think, reading that and thinking about how much our world has changed in the last five years, I just don't think we're anywhere close to the end of COVID story and understanding what has done to us and what the long-term effects are going to be.

Lizzie Wade:

I think it's a little simplistic to call these things positive or negative. It's complicated and, like everything, there's just new trajectories in societies that are completely unpredictable before these events and some people benefit and some people lose, and predicting who those people are going to be in any apocalypse is difficult, and I think that's the power of archaeology is that they can really see the whole story. They can see centuries after an apocalyptic event and see how these ripple effects and collisions and shocks to the system really play out. I wonder what that is going to look like for COVID and I think it's possible that it's only the archaeologists who are going to be really able to tell. We'll never fully understand what it did to us and it's only the archaeologists looking back at it that will fully be able to see those societal effects.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, I agree with you. I'm waiting for someone to come out. I mean, there's a couple books now out about basically who shot John, what we did right or what we did wrong, but I'm really interested in seeing if someone writing about actually the social effects that is had on education and I mean you just, I mean every facet of our lives it really has, and I think we're still living through it. Now, one of the things that I realized in reading your book is that you have to read history with a wizened eye. You have to understand whose narrative you are reading. I understand that I'm a history buff and I'm always trying to look at that angle, but there's one civilization that I have not read about is the Aztecs, and that is your home, where you are right now, and you really kind of lay out how they really did face the apocalypse between enemies, between their City, right?

Lizzie Wade:

fewer that survived from before the conquest, but there are some. But what we've really absorbed into, like what happened during this very early colonial period in Mexico, it's called the conquest. Think of it as this kind of period where you know this moment of contact, where what exactly was going to happen was still up for grabs Because Europeans wrote from the very beginning I mean Cortes was writing the kind of narratives we would absorb about the superiority of European civilization that the Aztecs sort of deserved. What happened to them? Because they were barbarians and, you know, non-christians or whatever.

Lizzie Wade:

Those narratives that the Europeans wrote that we can still read more easily because they're in. I mean, I speak Spanish. It's hard to read those documents in Spanish, like it's, you know those, but you can still do it. Those are the countries that we still identify with, the languages we can still read and the messages that really got not just created but entrenched over and over again by every sort of colonial decision and moment of, you know, racism and oppression. They've really limited our imaginations, I think, and it was just about who was writing them and if you can see this apocalypse from another perspective, which is possible through more recent sort of reinterpretations of the indigenous documents that were left behind and the archaeology, like you can really start to see it from.

Lizzie Wade:

For me, the most important point of any apocalypse is that, going into it, what happens is not inevitable. There's always people who have agency, always people who are deciding. You know, and sometimes that's really hard to see, like in Doggerland, like we can't see one, the span of one single human life, but like we know that people were reacting on on that span to sea level rise. And I think in a case like the conquest of Mexico and colonialism, where generally we've sort of absorbed this story that like, well, it was inevitable that these European powers would conquer this territory and that the introduced diseases would devastate indigenous communities and of course they did, and that's a huge piece of the story.

Lizzie Wade:

But I think we've overestimated just how inevitable all of that was and how, during apocalypses, everything is changing so quickly and it's really important not just have one perspective that you interpret that through and really try to see. All the of you know, nobility and commoners, spanish and Aztecs, all these different kinds of people experience these apocalypses and I don't think the right word is contribute to them. But they're all, as you said earlier, like everyone is making decisions throughout these events and like everyone is kind of doing the best they can in how they're surviving and reacting to these catastrophic moments and crises and they don't know what's going to happen next. And I think it's really important, especially in the case of colonialism, to try to return to that moment where nobody knew what was going to happen and really see the possibilities inherent in that change and that crisis and that catastrophic moment, and also how the narratives that we've been left with have really created quite a post-apocalyptic world for all of us who live in it.

Michele McAloon:

Right, lizzie, what you said is so true, and I keep returning back to this History is not inevitable. Our futures are not inevitable. We are creative beings. We were. You know, sign me up. I believe we were born out of creation. We were born to be creative beings and we can, but we as human beings can find the solution.

Michele McAloon:

And one thing that I really look at now is climate change Denier, acceptor, whatever but you know what? We have been able to make some great innovations to help our environment. We really have innovations in to help our environment. We really have, and we have the technology. If we have the will to do this, because we do, we are so creative and we are probably better fixed than ever before to handle a climate change because we have the technology to do this, a technology that is continually evolving, the information is continually evolving. So if we want to do it, we can do it. It's not catastrophic. It doesn't have to be catastrophic for us as human beings. So it really our choices are what make us. You know, our free choice, our free will, is what makes us.

Lizzie Wade:

I mean and I keep returning to that well, yeah, completely, and I think we do have so much great technology, and I think one of the things that I think is, you know, researching this book has made me think that one of the things that's holding us back is a fear of change.

Lizzie Wade:

I do not think humans are going to go extinct from climate change, no matter how bad it gets.

Lizzie Wade:

I used to think that I used to think that might not be such a bad thing, you know, and now I really think we're going to be able to to survive.

Lizzie Wade:

We're always going to be able to adapt, like it. But our societies might not look the same as they do now, our borders might not look the same, our governments might not look the same, and sort of clinging to again, it's not that these things are better or worse than others, but kind of clinging to a type of societal organization that patently isn't working and has led to climate change and has all these ripple effects from COVID, and insisting that that's the only way to be human, that's the only way to survive, that our particular hierarchies and social organization is more important than the survival of our species and our communities, is like that is what's really going to mess us up. I think we have to be really open to the possibility of quite radical change and you know that will involve losses as well as benefits, and I think really, really embracing the possibilities of that creativity is what we need to do next.

Michele McAloon:

Absolutely. Are we willing to trade power for survival? That is a continual question and it has marked history. So, lizzie Wade, I really, and it has marked history. So, lizzie Wade, I really, to the listeners, I think this is a great book. It's a great discussion. It would be a great book club read, especially one that had maybe both men and women in it. It brings up so many great nuggets that I didn't really have never paid attention the Harappa civilization, the Indus civilization, one of the most mysterious civilizations in the world. It's a great conversation. Books, and I cannot encourage people enough. You can find Lizzie Wade on her website at lizziewaderightcom, lizziewadecom and lizziewadecom. And this is actually a Harper imprint, right, HarperCollins imprint, so Harper books. So, lizzie, I hope you keep writing. Thank you so much. Yeah, I hope we get another interview with you at some time.

Lizzie Wade:

This is wonderful. Thank you so much, Michelle. Thank you, Lizzie.