Huichin - Berkeley, California
Apocalypse: from the Greek ἀποκάλυψις, apokalupsis: ‘uncover, reveal’
“The end of the world could mean merely that “the world”—our mutually constituted sense of the collective now—is changing into something else.”
–Roy Scranton
Here, Now
As I write, massive wildfires tear through vast swaths of the entire West Coast of the United States. Over three million acres have burned, and hundreds of thousands of have fled—the latest refugees of climate chaos. One month ago, lightning storms, coming northward from one of the ever-warmer ocean’s ever-larger storms, sparked hundreds of separate fires throughout California, which grew into infernos so hot they spawned fire tornados. The plumes of smoke are now so immense they cover much of North America and stretch hundreds of miles into the Pacific Ocean, and so intense that last week they literally blotted out the sun here, casting a dark orange shadow on the Bay Area and beyond, resembling nuclear winter. This is still the beginning of this year’s fire season.
At this moment, we are in the middle of endless days of brown haze and being shut almost entirely inside follow months of being largely inside during a global pandemic. Our daughter lies sleeping in her crib. The air is not nearly clean enough to have the windows open, and it has become clear that oxygen is going to be an increasingly rare gift here, this year and for the foreseeable future.
All over the world, we have been watching—in person and through screens—as our world burns, floods, convulses in state-sponsored violence, mutates through genetic, political and cybernetic engineering, is plagued by biological disease and economic collapse. The cascading disasters we have been watching and fearing are now here on our doorstep, in the air we breathe, burning down our homes. Our animal and plant kin are going extinct, our ecosystems are faltering. The suffering is terrible beyond reckoning.
As our daughter grows, what will we tell her brought us to this crisis? What will we say we did to protect, navigate, and regenerate to safeguard her future?
As we walk the uncertain and perilous path through this moment, I instinctively look to stories. Stories resonate with me now more than any information, as they hold more than simple explanations: they carry meaning beyond understanding. I listen gratefully to the stories of my ancestors and of the living peoples around me who have walked through the world ending before. Striving to understand, I know we cannot rely on understanding alone—this moment is far beyond that, and indeed this terrifyingly beautiful world is far too mercurial and mysterious to allow comprehension to be the dominant mode of healthy relationship.
My ancestry is full of worlds ending. In the Andes, the Mediterranean, Western Europe: between colonization, capitalism, and ecological collapse, empires and cultures rose and fell in waves. Some lasted, some were astonishingly fleeting ecocultural[1] realities that exploded in and out of being, receding into faint memory or total oblivion. Now, in all those places, many generations of adults have looked around and not recognized the world of their youth.
Everyone has ancestors who lived through collapse, through apocalypses that buried their old world while uncovering a new one.
. . .
California
Here in California, Native communities saw their societies, ecosystems, the world that they knew almost entirely disintegrated in disaster. Colonization, genocide, disease and ecological convulsion tore their world to shreds. Were an Indigenous person from 500 years ago to see the San Francisco Bay Area now, it would be largely unrecognizable: the land, waters and people are so radically transformed. It is hardly even recognizable to locals who are now middle aged and remember back to their childhoods. And yet the descendants of the original peoples still live here, remember that old world, and maintain their culture and connection to this land, these waters.
This remembrance, and embodiment of that culture, is despite two centuries marked by brutality severing of people’s connection to land and waters, by pillage and poisoning of water, soil and sky, by exploitation of people, animals, plants and all elements of the earth for the gains of the few. Industrial agriculture in the Central Valley tore through millennia of accumulated fertility in mere decades, drained the ancient lake’s water, and dammed all the major rivers. Controlled burning, the traditional way to tend the land, was outlawed, and fire suppressed for so long that the fuel load is uncontrollable.
The unprecedented disasters of these fires have revealed in searing clarity many actions and practices that created the fuel for the current devastating explosions of destruction. In that devastating clarity lies opportunity: for truth, reconciliation, and maybe even redemption. Crisis is a crossroads, a place where a choice must be made.
. . .
Europe
How did Europeans and their diaspora—myself included—become so blind, so numb to the danger and destructiveness of our way of life?
Living under the arrogant rule of a white supremacist patriarchal capitalist, one fairly recent cataclysm has been on my mind: the massacre of millions of medicine women and some men as heretics and witches leading into the Dark Ages and continuing well into the second millennia. This massacre was done largely in the name of Christ, of course benefiting the wealthy and powerful. The loss is incalculable. The people were bereft of their healers, their intermediaries between the human world and the larger more-than-human world on which they depended.
Right around when the women with the majority of the folk medicine knowledge were killed and driven into hiding, diseases came with unprecedented fury. The Black Death coincided with the end the old pagan world. The world that emerged lauded itself as being founded on knowledge—the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment. All the while, it scrubbed itself clean of the memory and dark guilt of these crimes, rewriting history as linear progress, and enthroning empirical science in all its abstraction and utilitarianism as the only true knowledge, a realm of elevated specialists and technocrats. The scientists were nearly all wealthy, and as far from earthy knowledge and the humble humus of Indigenous pagan place-based and relational knowledge as possible. The break was radical, severing Western Civilization from its roots, placing all value on intellect while devaluing the body, and centering male humans while disrespecting all other beings.
Many branches of my ancestors on all sides of the violence must have been terribly eager to forget this dark turn in history, to repress the memories of repression. And yet this forgetting allows many of us to convince ourselves that what happened was meant to be, that what we did and do in our own immediate interest was also meant to be, or was even divinely ordained. It allows us to repeat this history. Now, scientists and science-deniers alike dismiss those we need most as foolishly magical thinkers: our medicine people, prophets, poets, and Indigenous peoples who know how to live well in each environment.
This forgetting allows those in power to pretend that we can pump all the lifeblood from the soil and burn it without that heat burning us all.
. . .
Kambaland
My wife’s grandfather, Tata, told us some of his oldest memories while looking out over the last remaining stretch of savannah in Nairobi, bordered by skyscrapers in the distance. He told us how his father told him about the English first arriving to their ancestral home in Kambaland. He watched them come from the ridge beyond his house. The soldiers of the Empire declared everything in sight their property, their Empire. Their ancestral land was taken. Communal land, as a practice, was abolished with deeds of property. The English colonized or tried to colonize nearly every aspect of the economy, ecosystem, and culture, extracting the wealth of the land and people.
The world in which Tata grew up would have been unrecognizable to the previous generation, even as many cultural practices were carried into the new world. He came of age navigating the colonial school and work system; previous generations would have hardly separated work or education from the rest of life. Tata worked for a while in construction, and as rebellion began to shake the foundations of the colonial world, he helped build a large structure that he only later found out was a prison for enemies of the Empire. Eventually, he managed to acquire a farm in his ancestral land, where he made a life for his family, growing macadamia nuts and other cash crops. A bridge to those former worlds collapsed last year when he passed into the next world at the age of 97.
. . .
Palenque
In Palenque, the ancient Mayan city of the first millennium in the Yucatán Peninsula, I asked my tour guide, a local archeologist, what he thought brought the Maya civilization to collapse. I had heard a few theories, but none had fully convinced me. He told me a story I hadn’t heard before:
Many groups made up the Maya of the Classic Period, totaling millions of people at peak population. Palenque alone probably held hundreds of thousands.[2] As the population swelled, so did the ceremonial and state structure, and the temples of Palenque grew and grew. The stone was nearby, and definitely a huge effort to build with—but not a world-destroying effort. What did them in were the images: the hard plaster friezes, intricate and huge sculpted relief images of humans, animals, plants, all the elements in exquisite, much of which I was able to see intact, excavated and in the open air and in excellent condition hundreds of years later. These friezes require an enormous amount of carbon matter to make, in the form of burned trees. The sheer quantity of wood necessary for all the monumental art, history, and other sculpted writing and images in Palenque required decimating all the forests for hundreds of miles around. Forest was the primary ecosystem of this area, and without it, animal and plant life in the area collapsed—famine followed. People simply left, spreading out until they could live on the land again, leaving the temples to be swallowed by the jungle. Returning, perhaps, to an older world, since the empire’s promise of a bright future had collapsed under the weight of its own self-aggrandizing images.
. . .
Andes
Near Lake Titicaca in the Bolivian Altiplano, at 4000m above sea level, lie the ruins of Tiwanaku, the city at the center of a civilization that lasted for a millennium, from approximately the years 0 through 1000. In one of the oldest areas of the ruins, the semi-subterranean temple, I heard the following story told by an archeologist in charge of the excavation of the monumental center of the city[3]:
This temple was the oldest and most sacred space of the city, the center of the center of a large civilization. On a plain at the top of the world surrounded by glaciated peaks, on the edge of the largest body of fresh water on the continent, the semi-subterranean temple is placed between worlds. This liminal space, aka pacha, is placed between the above, alax pacha, and the below, uju pacha. The temple floor is sunk one story down into the ground. Its stone walls are lined with dozens of life-sized carven heads sculpted out of many types of stone, many brought from very far away. If you stand among all the stone heads and look straight across the temple at the sacred mountain, you will see the peak of the mountain perfectly positioned in the center of the universe: all stars in the cosmos rotate around the peak of the sacred apu.
For hundreds of years, this was the center of the Tiwanakan world: the holy mountain, where the snows fell and the rainclouds gathered, source of water and spirit of earth thrust into sky. As the centuries passed, Tiwanaku’s prestige and fame grew as a center of ceremonial power, supported by huge festivals full of art, feasting and celebration. Thousands arrived yearly for the massive seasonal festivals, and each year the empire built bigger attractions. The leaders finally decided to build truly big: they created a massive temple, pyramid-scale. For a person standing in the semi-subterranean temple, the apex of the man-made mini mountain was positioned in front of the actual sacred peak. Here, of course, the most powerful priest placed himself, replacing the sacred apu with his own person, positioning himself as the new center of the universe.
Right around this same time, fossil records show very little rainfall, terrible drought, and lake receding. Suddenly the thriving port of Tiwanaku was landlocked. People stopped coming to the seasonal festivals. The empire faltered and the city of Tiwanaku was abandoned. By the time the Inca arrived conquering several centuries later, Tiwanaku was long abandoned.
In the Andes, one key concept for understanding time and change is Pachakuti.[1] Pacha can be translated as “space-time” or “world” (pachamama might be translated as “mother-world,” though it is most often translated as Mother Earth). Kuti signifies return, revolution, turning over. This philosophical idea describes the world shaking, turning upside down, being destroyed and remade. It is said that 500 years or so the world undergoes a Pachakuti—around 1000 Tiwanaku fell, around 1500 the Europeans arrived. And now: well, here we are.
. . .
Not far from Tiwanaku, on Kallawaya land in the high Andes, I was contemplating their sacred mountain at the center of their world with a community leader.[4] He told me that the old folks there have always said that when the glaciers on the top are finally gone, it will be the end of the world.
Soon after, I stood on the flanks of nearby sacred mountain Ausungate, watching, and weeping, as the glaciers melted. My local guides, two brothers, told me about the mountain’s famed yearly celebration, Qoyllur Rit’i, in which the community celebrates the cyclical fertilization of the valleys by the ancient glacier’s icemelt. The mountains, towering upward into the sky, are the cold masculine element, their milky white liquid running down into the warm female valleys, which then become pregnant with life. This is not a metaphor; it is a description of the ecological process that brings life into being. Yearly, since time immemorial, the community dances, sings, and ceremonially cuts blocks of ice from the glacier.
Several years ago, the community spiritual authorities decided to stop the practice of harvesting ice, since there is so little left. They do not want to hasten the end.
. . .
The memory of many recent world-ending experiences of Indigenous peoples, Black folks, Jews, and others is held, cared for, tended. Collectively, we are beginning to recognize the effects of intergenerational trauma caused by these cataclysms. Equally important, we are beginning to recognize the power of intergenerational resilience and the invaluable learnings held among those who have survived their worlds ending. We must center these people as leaders if we wish to pass through this current inferno.
Somehow, so far, we have persisted. We may once more. As we look back, we can see the scorched-and-regreened path we’ve walked, how we have collectively made it through hell and back over and over again. Our worlds are reborn from rubble generation after generation, collapse after collapse. While we attend to the urgent needs of the present, we must also remember these bigger and older cycles, remember how Earth, our home, our mother, became this way, remember how we came to be this way, here at this crossroads.
Soon, our children will look back at the path we brought them down, and look at how we tended to and renewed—or not—this now burnt and abused land. And they will judge us.
We inherit from our ancestors, and we borrow from future generations.[5] These apocalypses can help us to uncover the memories that we have grown out of, the experiences and patterns that nourished or poisoned us, that make us who we are now. As we consider what type of ancestors we wish to become, we must be willing to be transformed, as completely as our world, the Earth herself, is now transforming beyond recognition.
