Boxes of documents at Library and Archives Canada's consultation room in Ottawa.Justin Tang/The Globe and Mail
Mary Soderstrom’s latest book is Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us Through the Next 75 Years.
In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, begun in 1947 by the physicists who helped develop the first nuclear weapons, moved the second hand on its Doomsday Clock from 89 to 85 seconds before midnight, the moment when the Earth supposedly will face catastrophe. “Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war, climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence, and other apocalyptic dangers,” read the accompanying statement from the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board.
It’s enough to give you nightmares.
No doubt humankind is in for some rough times in the decades ahead. But there is abundant evidence from the past that humankind is amazingly resilient. What is important is that we remember both individually and collectively that despite the calamities that befall us, we may endure. If we remember, we will go on.
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In 2023 I published my 18th book, Against the Seas: Saving Civilizations from Rising Waters, which looked at how rising temperatures are going to reshape the world. The subject matter had me frequently contemplating the end of the world as we know it, and how we might yet survive. The initial question I asked myself was: How to cope? I came up with four ways: Resist, reconcile and accommodate, retreat and, finally, remember.
Now I’m convinced that remembering will be the key.
Left to its own devices, the Earth abides, we are told. One recent example is what is happening now in the towns near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, whose four reactors were destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami of 2011. There, the countryside has become so overgrown that wild boar, raccoons and black bears are thriving. Similarly, despite radiation levels too high for humans to move back in, deer, badgers, European bison and many other animals now make their home in the 2,800-square kilometre Exclusion Zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, which melted down in 1986.
But what about the people who have faced catastrophe? The cultures they created have proven to be remarkably tough, reverberating down centuries, even millennia. Consider the legacy of the Greco-Roman world, which supposedly ended when Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor, fell in 476 CE, ushering in the so-called “Dark Ages.” Yet Roman influence is everywhere today – from our legal precept that one should be considered innocent until proven guilty to the languages that about a billion people speak that are directly derived from Latin.
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Similarly, more than once China has been led by rulers who were determined to erase the past. The First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang (259-210 BCE), attempted to completely wipe out the centuries of Confucian thought and Chinese culture that came before him, while in the 20th century Mao Zedong tried to overthrow a past he considered feudal. Nevertheless, what might be called the core of Chinese culture has survived, sometimes forced underground, but running on like a subterranean river.
And then there are the Indigenous cultures of North America. They were devastated first by disease and then by genocidal policies of European intruders to the point where tens if not hundreds of millions died, and languages were lost. Yet in the 21st century attempts are being made to revitalize their cultures. Not only does Canada’s federal government now finance programs to protect Indigenous languages, the voices of Indigenous writers are increasingly being heard in English and French.
The key in all these cases is memory – ranging from stories and skills passed on from one generation to another to libraries and archives, public and private, virtual and brick-and-mortar. A major reason that the influence of the Romans lives on is because the drama, poetry, philosophy and thought of the Greco-Roman world were gathered together in many libraries outside of Europe during the “golden age” of Islam from the 8th to the 13th century. As historian Violet Moller notes in her book The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found, in France the “twelfth century scholar Bernard of Chartres was proud of the 24 books he owned, but in 1258 the city of Baghdad boasted 36 public libraries and over a hundred book merchants.”
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Today, it is imperative that institutions such as the Library and Archives of Canada safeguard the books, documents and virtual holdings of our societies. Similarly, our current vast, web-based treasure houses of information should be protected – as well as the film, music and other art forms that constitute the soul of our cultures. This will require constant maintenance to avoid decay, just as in the past those ancient scrolls had to be recopied every 150 years or so because the papyrus used disintegrated. The current standard for preserving paper documents is 300 years or more, while information stored digitally must be constantly upgraded as platforms and technology evolves. These all could vanish at the whim of authorities or in the electronic equivalent of a tsunami.
There’s hope that the stresses our civilizations are undergoing now might work to our advantage. A 2024 study by a group of anthropologists recently showed that over the course of human history, being disrupted frequently enhanced the resilience of people and their societies. Using trash dated by carbon-14 analysis, the group looked at 16 different cultures. In all of them, there were periods of flourishing populations and times of decline, with the cycles varying from a few decades to a thousand years. And, while you might expect that the populations who had the most of these boom-and-bust cycles would be worn down by the turmoil and suffer the greatest, the researchers found the opposite, writing “that frequent disturbances enhance a population’s capacity to resist and recover from later downturns.”
On those dark nights when the end seems close, we should remember that the end of the world has been predicted many times. But we’re still here. Even if things fall apart, many of us will survive. There’s a good chance, too, that some of us will thrive, thanks to all we’ve stored away in our individual and collective memories, ready to pass on to those who come after.