Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

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

The grip of capitalism can appear inescapable.

Often we feel powerless against this monolith of modern reality.

It's become too central, too vast, too unwieldy to simply transcend.

Yet in truth, capitalism is an ideology imposed, a framework that has, over the course of history,

dismantled entire world to make way for a vision of unending progress and profit.

And while it may indeed feel immovable, deeply permanent,

there are people and places that have survived attempts to end their world and birth another.

In this story from our archive,

ecological historian Bishiba Demuth

explores the allure of the apocalyptic

arc, the ending of an old world, and the promise of a new, perfect one.

As she crosses the easternmost edge of northern Russia, Bishiba traces the rise and ruin

of the Soviet ideology that imposed its utopian vision of a tamed and commodified

tundra upon the Chukchi people, and their herds of reindeer.

Finding uneasy parallels between such aims and today's capitalist ideals, she considers

survival against systems of power and wonders how we might reimagine the apocalyptic arc as the world as we know it ends.

The fox comes out of the willows across the creek. She is nearly invisible at first, standing in the lee of a sunbeam where it breaks over the ravine behind her.

Early morning sun, late in a summer of intense heat.

Here, 20 miles north of the Arctic Circle, the light is dilute, low on the horizon and stained

...