Lizzie Wade (anthropology journalist, author of Apocalypse) has studied history’s most notorious civilizational collapses and has arrived at a bold conclusion: catastrophe and metacrises don’t always have to spell human wipeout. Instead, they can be the very thing that creates the future…even a better one.
Lizzie is an award-winning science journalist and correspondent for Science, one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals. She covers archaeology, anthropology, and Latin America for the journal and also writes for Wired, The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times, etc. Her recent book, Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures, came out as I was finishing edits on my book, and it explores a range of apocalyptic events, like El Niño disasters from 5000 years ago and the Black Death.
Drawing on archaeology and anthropology, it talks us through what we can urgently learn from our ancestors today. And it’s not necessarily what you’d expect.
I was super keen to have this chat because Lizzie’s thesis stretches what we already know about our predicament in challenging, and quite heartening, ways.
SHOW NOTES
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