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.

Roy Scranton is the author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, reflections on the end of a civilization, and the novel War Porn.

In this essay, Roy asks,

what do we mean when we say the world is ending?

As consoling narratives about the future fail

in the face of the perilous reality of climate change,

he explores what revelation may be before us.

We do not know the future. We do not know when the next storm will make landfall. We do not know when the next storm will make landfall. We do not know the future. We do not know when the next storm will make landfall.

We do not know when the next pandemic will erupt.

We do not know when the next drought will strike.

We do not know how much the planet will warm in our lifetimes.

We do not know whether we can renovate global economic, political, and energy infrastructure

swiftly enough to prevent catastrophe. We do not know whether our civilization will survive the next

century. We do not know how many will die. In the fall of 1965, as beaches and ginkos began turning all across the campus of Brynmark College,

British literary critic and English professor Frank Kermode gave a series of talks about the future.

His topic was The Long Perspectives, and his main concern, broadly framed, was the fictional structures we impose

on time and experience in order to make them bearable.

Kermode was interested in how we relate an individual human life, with its beginning,

middle, and end, to grander narratives, historical or cosmological in character, about

the fate of the world.

...