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

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people in present-day Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

What if we had only decades left before the last harvest capable of feeding the world?

Accustomed to a ceaseless abundance of resources, can we comprehend

suddenly running out of enough food? Whether something like this comes to pass or not, does

the act of imagining it give us a kind of certainty amid ecological chaos? In 30 short passages, spanning from pruning dandelions with her four-year-old

to grappling with the mathematical theory of infinity, art historian and writer Annabel Howard

moves through a mind-warping process of fathoming a world where the cycles that have sustained

us since the beginning of time cease.

Alongside her fascination with the apocalyptic imagery in Botticelli's mystical nativity,

she contemplates how imagining the end of the infinite is not radical for our time,

but rather an enduring way of giving shape to inconceivable realities.

Like all of us, she reaches for certitude amid the fear of a world aflame, only to glimpse

the paradox of apocalypse, that in ending, their lies beginning.

You are just four.

You can conceptualize up to and including the number 30.

Anything above 30 is 121 and as huge as the entire world is big. There will soon come a time when you discover that the world is not so big after all. That time for adults is now. 30 years is the low

estimate from the UN's Food and Agriculture

Organization for the number of harvests, the number of annual cycles, before humanity's food runs

out. Imagine. In this worst-case scenario, you can't in any way conceive of the world, but you can already count the years until you run out of food.

When I tell your father the 30-year statistic, he goes silent and pulls out his phone.

...