Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Each week we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

We commissioned four authors to approach the theme of apocalypse through fiction from the perspectives of past, present, and future.

Our fourth and final installment is a short story by Ben Okre, entitled

And Peace Shall Return. Ben is a Nigerian poet, novelist and playwright, whose many books

and poetry collections include prayer for the living, rise like lions, poetry for the many,

and The Famished road.

Narrated by the British actor Colin Salmon,

and peace shall return is set 20,000 years into the future,

when an exploration of the earth

uncovers the final notes and unfinished stories

left behind by the last sentient human beings in the twilight of their history.

Once upon a time, in a world that no longer exists, there was a planet with vast seas, abundant forests, splendid continents, polar regions,

and civilizations that evolved from remote beginnings to an age of skyscrapers and digital

revolutions. Those who lived on this planet seemed to have the idea that no matter what

they did, life would continue there.

In fewer than 10,000 years, they transformed their societies from rough conditions to ways of life so sophisticated that practically everything they did directly or indirectly

contributed to the death of their planet and the devastation of human beings.

They had ample evidence of the daily

destruction they were reeking on themselves, on their environment and on their own lives. But they did

not heed it. They fell into the invisible effects fallacy. This holds that though we do things which add up to a catastrophe, we are

...