In August 2019, which was at the time the hottest summer that had ever been recorded,

Iceland held a funeral for its first glacier lost to the climate crisis.

A bronze plaque was mounted on a bear rock on the barren terrain which was once covered by the

Ojoca glacier. The plaque reads, a letter to the future. This is the first Icelandic glacier to

lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same

path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done.

Only you know if we did it. August 2019, 415 parts per billion CO2.

We are living through a time of multiple overlapping crises, whether that be the accelerating

climate crisis, land wars in Europe threatening to tip over into nuclear disaster and of course

the continued virological threat of the COVID-19 pandemic. I sat down with philosopher

Sretchko Hallvack to talk about his book after the apocalypse to talk about how we as students

of the past and as people invested in a livable future grapple with the lessons of this moment.

Sretchko, hi, thank you so much for joining us.

Hi, thanks for having me today.

So you're work delving into the ways in which multiple different forms of the apocalypse as it

were overlap and can accelerate each other and how I guess we live with that in our

in our contemporaries of everyday lives feels increasingly relevant to this particular moment.

So what is it like for you as a sort of student of the end of the world to see the prospect of

nuclear conflict, dovetailing with climate change and with virological threats? What does that

like? Well, it's terrible. It's terrible because I've been dealing with this for months and years

doing research. The book was actually the book which is called after the apocalypse was actually

written just before the pandemic. So when the pandemic started, I had to rewrite it again.

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