Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is Peter Brannen.
Peter Brannen is a science journalist and contributing writer at The Atlantic. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Guardian among other publications. His book, The Ends of the World, about the five major mass extinctions in Earth's history, was published in 2017 by Ecco. He was most recently a visiting scholar at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and is an affiliate at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
With the election of Donald Trump, a shameful COP29, the wreckage of major hurricanes and floods around the world, apocalypse is in the air. It’s easy to feel like everything is spinning out of control. I’ve certainly been grappling with this; in fact part of the reason I do this show is because I want to better understand these existential threats in order to then consider the appropriate responses.
My guest today is something of an expert in apocalypses: having written one of the key books on the topic of mass extinctions, The Ends of the World. It’s an invigorating read, in part because you really confront the raw power and volatility of this planet—and because you can then more thoroughly appreciate the blissful window of relative calm and stability that humanity has evolved within. Of course, you then must confront the fact that techno-industrial civilization is artificially undertaking many of the same processes that brought about past mass extinctions.
In many cases, the carbon cycle played a pivotal role in rendering the planet virtually uninhabitable—and in bringing it back into habitability. So it’s fitting that Peter’s forthcoming bookThe Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World, centers on this exact topic. We mostly discussed the Ends of the World in this conversation, but I was lucky to get into some of his research for The Story of CO2, and he’s agreed to come back and chat about it in more depth next year. But for now, buckle up and enjoy this wild deep-time conversation with Peter Brannen.
Grab your copy of 'Ends of the World' now.
Some other episodes you might like:
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Guests on Urgent Futures are experts across art, science, media, technology, philosophy, economics, mathematics, anthropology, and more. We live in complex times; these are the voices who will help you orient to emerging futures.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode with Phoebe Barnard on the ‘Human Behavioral Crisis’—and what it means for civilizational shift:
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