For episode 175, Elia Ayoub and Anna M (co-host of ⁠Obscuristan⁠) are joined by Larisa Jašarević to talk about her new book “⁠Beekeeping in the End Times⁠.” They delve into bees and Abrahamic faiths, climate change, folk tradition, and above all how we can all be connecting to the natural world while still remaining rooted in ourselves and our lives.

The Fire These Times is a proud member of⁠ ⁠From The Periphery (FTP) Media Collective⁠⁠. Check out other projects in our media ecosystem: From The Periphery Podcast, The Mutual Aid Podcast⁠, ⁠Politically Depressed⁠, ⁠Obscuristan⁠, and ⁠Antidote Zine⁠.

To get early access to our episodes as well as other perks (monthly hangout, movie club, exclusive content and so on) you can join our patreon on Patreon.com/fromtheperiphery 

For more:

• Elia Ayoub is on ⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠, ⁠Mastodon⁠, ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ and blogs at ⁠Hauntologies.net⁠ 
• Larisa Jašarević has a website
• The Fire These Times is on Bluesky,⁠ IG⁠ and has a⁠ ⁠website⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠
• From The Periphery is on⁠ ⁠Patreon⁠⁠, ⁠Bluesky⁠, ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠,⁠ Instagram⁠, and has a⁠ website⁠⁠

Transcriptions: Transcriptions are done by⁠ Antidote Zine⁠ and will be published on⁠ The Fire These Times’ transcript archive⁠.

Credits:

Anna (host), Elia Ayoub (host, producer, episode design), ⁠Elliott Miskovicz⁠ (sound editor), ⁠⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (Music), ⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (TFTT theme design), ⁠⁠Hisham Rifai⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP theme design) and ⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP team profile pics). 

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Transcript via Antidote Zine:

So much discourse connected to environmentalism, environmental disaster and climate disaster, is about hope. But hope is a very thin, speculative philosophical ground without faith in the picture—and it also does imply some sort of faith, with all sorts of metaphysical assumptions that are rarely put on the table.

 

Faith is essential to keeping hope and therefore practicing good things, ecologically, and scrambling our way out of disaster.

Anna M: Welcome, Larisa.

Larisa Jašarević: Thanks for having me, hello.

AM: We’re here to talk about your book, Beekeeping in the End Times. I’m wondering if you could introduce the book and what it’s about to our audience, so we can ground ourselves before we start talking about the many themes in it.

LJ: I’m an anthropologist; I live in a mountaintop village these days in northeastern Bosnia, by an apiary. It’s my father’s home village; I’ve returned to the land and came back to my paternal village.

The book has been written on this apiary. This apiary, this land, is one of the cornerstones of the writing, and has been for the many years that the book has been in production. The book sums up a research project that has been going on since 2014, concerning honeybees and how they weather climate change—the ground effects of climate change that are being felt here around Bosnia, mainly discerned by beekeepers in particular.

The book, in a nutshell, is about learning to spot the ground effects of climate change, with a focus on honeybees and their appetites for blooming plants, for pollen and for nectar, but also trying to think about the larger context of climate change and everything that entails—the crisis of imagination, daunting questions about the future, the meaning of it all—from a different perspective, the perspective of Islamic eschatology, tales about death and the end of the world.

AM: Here at From The Periphery, we often find ourselves talking about the personal and the political—and recently a lot more about the religious. This book, for me, was a bit of a revelation because it was written from a deeply religious Islamic perspective. My family in Armenia were also historically beekeepers, and some of them still keep bees in our village in Armenia—and I read this book while I was by our two hives in my paternal village, sitting with my aunt who still keeps bees there.

Elia J. Ayoub: I didn’t know that!

AM: Yeah—Elia, you sent it to me and a month later I was in Shnogh village in Armenia, sitting by the bees reading this book, observing them and observing my aunt, and seeing various connections but also getting a different perspective on what these creatures that I always loved mean for this little village, and also another little village somewhere else.

I was deeply moved by that perspective in the book.

LJ: Just amazing that you were looking at the hives and smelling the hives and watching the bees, and probably hearing your aunt talk about the bees. Beekeepers can’t stop talking about bees and thinking about them. It puts such a different spell on the whole story that you were reading.

AM: It was fascinating for me—I’m a bit more religious than this part of the family, but Armenia is typically very religious and Christian, and there’s an orthodox Christian church I could see from my aunt’s house, just down the little village road. It was interesting to hear her talk about the bees, and read about beekeepers in your book talking about the bees, and hear your voice speaking about the bees, and to compare the deeply similar way they are addressed.

I’m just getting to know this aunt again, and I wouldn’t want to speak for her, but she’s not a very religious person, so it was fascinating how from a completely different place and perspective, she spoke in a similar way about her relationship to her hive. 

In the very beginning of the book, you talk about when honeybees swarm, and the process and method of preventing them from leaving the hive—not just physically stopping them from leaving; it’s also about restoring the connection between the beekeeper and the bees. My aunt got sick over the winter, and she wasn’t in the village, and her bees started swarming, and the neighbors came together to try and prevent them from leaving her hive. Later she said, Yeah, but I wasn’t here. Their keeper wasn’t there, so many of the bees left because there was no connection restored with me.

I wanted to ask specifically: what inspired you to talk about bees? I know you keep bees now, but were you keeping bees before you started writing this book? Or was that something that came out of the research that you had been doing?

LJ: Let’s take a few steps back, because you said a few really interesting things we should pick up. You started by saying that you were surprised by a story about the end of the world, climate change, and honeybees told from a religious perspective. It’s interesting to highlight what you’re saying, because one of the reasons I wrote this book the way I did is because I feel that overall, we’ve been talking so much about politics (for all the obvious reasons; we ought to, we have to!), but all the talk and tension about politics has overshadowed all other ways of thinking and feeling about the world. 

Things that really matter, like ecology and end-times feelings and so forth—one of the things I’m trying to do here, hoping, striving, praying I do it, is to highlight the reverence that in this case honeybees suggest people have across places, across cultures, across religious or areligious traditions, and to start with that reverence which resonates across many different publics: secular, religious, and so forth. I’m highlighting reverence and ecological undertones, but also unearthing eschatological undertones of the Islamic tradition. 

I’m hoping to contribute a different voice, a different story. There are all these different discourses about Islam and religion. When you said that the book resonated with you and with your aunt, that’s no accident. If you pick up books by biologists, and bee biologists in particular, stories and interjections of adoration and wonder resonate from one page to another. There’s something very similar to reverence that we found in popular science writings authored by biologists. That’s something I think is really precious for us to zoom in on and work with, precisely because it opens up conversations across so many different publics.

AM: Was it this sense of reverence that led you into writing about bees?

LJ: It was. I didn’t keep bees; no one in my family had bees. I didn’t have that immediate connection with beekeeping culture. I was really interested in honey, to begin with, for various reasons. Honey is treated as medicine here—and not just here but across cultural traditions, healing traditions; for many herbalists honey is very prized and cherished and is attributed with various medical therapeutic properties.

At the same time I was interested in Islamic metaphysics. These two things basically came together and got me interested in honeybees.

AM: Elia, I wanted to ask you: what is your relationship to bees? I’m curious, because everyone has very different reactions to things that buzz around them. Are you scared of them? Do you enjoy them from afar? Did you like them as a kid? What kind of reaction do they call upon from you?

EA: I love them. Half an hour ago there was a bee that entered the house, and we have a baby so I was slightly worried, but I like bees so I was very chill.

I grew up in the mountains of Lebanon, and there were always bees—now the population has declined, as it has across the world, but it’s still a common sight. I admit my earliest associations are kind of sad: we used to go to a country club with a pool, outside in the mountains; they had a lot of bees because they were serving food—and they would kill the bees. They would put traps with sweetener inside; the bees would go inside but wouldn’t know how to go out. Year after year, I couldn’t not think about them all the time. There were so many. We would go there pretty regularly when it was hot, in the spring and summer. I used to swim, I used to take lessons there, so this was a very common sight for me to see.

Early on I was always into animals. I was vegetarian; I had a thing for animals growing up, and it was one of those early memories I had: There’s something wrong with how humans treat non-humans. Before I could speak, I had this association. Then it became a symbol of the environmental movement—more than the polar bear, in my head. For me it was just the bees, We have to protect the bees. The discourse was a little shallow, people saying this without necessarily knowing what to do with the information that they are threatened. But it’s a thing. I like bees and always have.

AM: Save the bees is a thing that you hear a lot. But I didn’t put together until much later—I have a familial connection with bees and I’ve always liked them, but I didn’t put together this spiritual, environmental, and (for me) ancestral, natural connection to bees until much later in life when I was able to spend more time in my paternal village and spend more time around bees themselves, and find out more about the folk traditions associated with bees.

On the one hand, it is an ancestral thing my family did, they kept bees, but also it was during the Soviet Union, so it was very systematized; it was a science for them. The business may even have played some role in my great-grandfather eventually being sent off and killed on the way to Siberia. In the Soviet Union it was an industrial undertaking, in some senses, but in the other sense, if you visit this village and these mountains, there’s nothing industrial about it. It’s beekeepers in one of the most beautiful places on Earth trying to figure out how to maintain this relationship, and each one of them approaching it in a very different way.

In fact, some beekeepers in Armenia—not so much anymore, but a common thing to do would be: in the summers you would migrate to a different mountain near your village and take the bees with you. You would bring them to this mountain where the flowers are more lush, where there was more wildlife and different sorts of pollen for them to be able to collect. This summer I was also able to visit the mountain to which my family used to migrate for the summer; it’s very close to our village. It was very interesting to go with my aunt and hear her say on the way up: This is where the beekeepers usually used to be.

It was fascinating to hear her talk about this, and it was even more fascinating listening to that through the lens of Beekeeping in the End Times and learning about how that looks in a different place.

LJ: The itinerant beekeeping that you’re describing was pretty much the norm for the beekeepers here as well. The traveling is different than what we’re accustomed to think of in relation to industrial beekeeping (the infamous orchards, and bees being trucked hundreds of miles from one corner of the country to another) in Bosnia, and I presume Armenia as well, because of the scale of the operation, the scale of the apiaries that are involved, and also the distances that are much shorter.

But if you remember, part of the story of Beekeeping in the End Times is that age-old strategies are no longer working. When I started working back in 2014, beekeepers were saying that you can no longer just have your bees in your backyard and count on the flowers to grow and the honey to flow, but you actually have to move if you want to gather any honey, and some beekeepers who were previously stationary were finding somewhere new to take the bees, and making use of different forage seasons, different altitudes. The same plant, for instance, used to have different blooming schedules at different altitudes. They would be using these different altitudes and different microclimates and eco-niches precisely to diversify the forage opportunities for the bees. 

By 2017, and certainly by 2020, these former differences in climates and altitudes really no longer made a difference, because the seasons were so altered; the nectar-secreting schedules and life cycles of the plants were entirely thrown off.

AM: This is interesting. When we went up to this mountain, my aunt and uncle were lamenting the lack of people—they were very upset there were no longer people there, because since their childhoods, that migration schedule, “hil anil” in Armenian, has now fallen away. Nobody really does it anymore. I wonder if that’s part of the reason why. Because there used to be very practical reasons for why you would follow this pattern in your own life, why you would follow this migration pattern of leaving your village home for a summer, with the children and the cows and everything, and come back down to the village in the fall. 

Like you were saying, there were specific plants you were looking for; you were hoping that your cows and your pigs would be able to feed off the different wildlife, and now that’s become flattened—and not only by climate change, but also by mining. In this particular region, a mine opened up nearby. And the differences are not immediately visible, but it is interesting hearing beekeepers talk about it, because they notice the smallest changes immediately: which animals are coming closer to people, which plants are now not as fruitful as they once were.

You mentioned in the book that beekeepers in Bosnia would talk about there being seemingly lush fields and no bees swarming around them. The book opens with an Islamic hadith, of an angel asking if the bees are still swarming. That sign of seeing a still beautiful sight but without its core elements—for beekeepers, the bees, but for my aunt it was also the people—the same sight without people and without bees; seeing that distinction and knowing this is change that is very drastic, though it seems small.

LJ: You said it. Beekeepers notice. This is really important. Among many nature-watchers, beekeepers have a very fine, keen, delicate sense of the insects’ relationship with plants, and plants’ relationships with weather, with the elements. This is why they have a very particular grasp on the ground effects of climate change, and why it’s very important that beekeepers are part of the story of the climate change effects we’re talking about.

When we say “we,” we’re all contributing to that story in one way or another. It’s an open question what climate change effects entail, what kinds of world alterations that entails. It’s something we’re only just discovering. But I say “we” once again; I mean all of us who are paying attention, and also the scientists who are in the business of noticing—but now things are happening so rapidly and across so many different fronts, their task of observing is becoming that much more difficult.

This is why, once again, participants—those who have their hands on the different species, like beekeepers who have their hands on insects and are keenly observing the bees—really have something important to say and contribute to the story of climate change.

AM: You open the book following your neighbor, who you say is a traditional beekeeper, distinguished from modern beekeeping by following certain practices, folk practices that were traditional to her. But you also mention that these are informed by Islam, and that though these beekeepers aren’t necessarily studying Islam, they’re practicing it almost as a form of oral tradition.

This is also much closer to how I’ve experienced Armenian orthodox Christianity. I was wondering if you could talk about the significance of that spiritual connection and how that informs their beekeeping and their relationship to these hives for which they are caretakers and custodians.

LJ: It’s not a hadith—should I read it? You’re bringing me back to two stories from the book. One is about the angels, and the other one is about a swarming event, by a traditional beekeeper.

The book opens up with a story that is not a hadith but is a folk story which very much leans on the Islamic eschatological tradition, in vernacular terms, in folk terms, to retell the whole lore, to sum up the reverence about bees, and to reference the Islamic tradition, but without necessarily citing a hadith from the Quran. But it’s a very telling story. It goes like this:

Every hundred years, two angels open up their eyes, and they ask, “Are the bees still swarming?”

And their fellow angels, those who keep a watchful eye on the world, say, “The bees are still swarming.”

“What about the sheep?” the two angels ask. “Are they still lambing?”

And their fellow angels look at the world and they say, “Oh, yes, the sheep are still lambing.”

“What about the fish?” the two angels ask.

And their fellow angels reply, “The fish are still spawning.”

“Well, then,” the two angels say, “the end is not yet.” And they close their eyes for another spell of silent meditation.

This is a story that is retold by beekeepers and by many nature-lovers and bee-lovers across Bosnia. Usually the story is told especially when there is a catastrophic event, at whichever scale: someone’s bees collapse or have been killed by pesticides that someone has sprayed on a nearby field, or they will hear something about bees doing poorly—when there are mass deaths reported from northern Europe and the United States, these stories are being told. And in light of catastrophic weather events, these stories are being told.

They are very powerful stories, not least because they are teaching us, but the core assumption is that the world’s end is coming, it’s looming. A piece that is not mentioned in the angels’ exchange is the human species actually being culpable; it’s only the human species who could possibly be at fault for these species not doing so well. But it’s also teaching care for non-human species. It’s teaching about responsibility, and reminding us of our responsibility, and reminding that the delicate balance and the fate of the world hinges on the welfare of the animals, and implicitly, on humans living up to their responsibility to treat the other species well.

AM: This is a perfect transition, because I want to talk about that: humans and other species and what our responsibility is—but specifically among the left. After the nineties, there was this big shift from sentimental environmentalism to a practical, human-centric prediction of disaster. This is how many people will be displaced by climate change; these are the effects on people; these are the economic consequences of it. These are certainly all true and important. I also think it wasn’t a completely meritless switch, because the American and European sentimentalist view of nature and land as empty and untouched was something that underpinned American colonization and so much colonization from the West in general, this idea of beautiful landscapes without people.

Now, today, there’s been a pendulum swing back, as this sentimental attitude towards nature is creeping back into left spaces—which is good, but now when we ask people to access their connection to land, it’s usually tangential in some way. You’ll hear a lot of Indigenous beliefs invoked vaguely. But there has been a real loss in how to conceive of land and love for land without invoking that pure sentimentality or strict practicality, or leaning on traditions that are significant but not always our own.

The book was a really unique stand against those choices. I was wondering if you could talk about that, and about what bees and this relationship to bees, and what specifically the Islamic perspective can offer us in terms of connecting to land and seeing our place in it without relying on either sentimentality or soulless practicality, or a tradition that may be far away from us or not ours to claim.

LJ: This is a wonderful question. I’m thinking about several things. I’m thinking about the gut-deep unease Elia was describing when he remembers being a boy and seeing all these bees being caught in traps. Gut-level unease is a reaction which is not disconnected from love, and a sense of fairness and a sense of responsibility. It’s something we ought to tap into.

Again, who is “we?” I assume our listeners are nature-lovers, or at least deeply concerned about what is happening now in the atmosphere and the biosphere. So when I say “we,” I mean the sympathetic listeners and the two of you, my fellows right now on the show. I think that visceral resource we have, of empathy and care and love, is something we ought to be dipping in. And environmentalists are dipping in it in various ways.

Quite right—the stories that are available out there now, especially among the academics who are eco-minded and who are really trying to rethink our relationship with non-humans and with many different species now in the light of a sort of disenchantment with many if not all things modern, including our anthropocentric ideologies, are not always about our human/non-human relationships. But many academics are now searching for these other stories, other ways of retelling these connections and recuperating these gut feelings, or recuperating some ideals or aspirations that we could be cultivating.

But we could also be inspired, it could also oil our imaginations, so that we hopefully do things differently, and scramble for ways through this climate disaster. I’m a part of this way of trying to figure out ways out through storytelling, among other things. For me, given that I was working with Bosnian Muslims, but also that I was working very closely with Sufi sheikhs and imams—many of the beekeepers were imams—it was inevitable to tap into the whole Islamic and Muslim lore that surrounds honeybees in particular but nature in general.

As I was thinking about honeybees and thinking through the climate disaster, which locals here, Muslims and beekeepers who are deeply concerned, are also describing as “akhir alzaman,” the End Times, the Final Times—in order to take these stories seriously, I was digging through and listening very carefully to the Muslim stories, unearthing the Islamic cosmology, and unearthing a whole treasure house of Islamic eschatology, which surprisingly is full of ecological undertones which are not appreciated, precisely because too often we gloss all these things with political balances. And then we miss so much of what’s there, of imagination and inspiration, and also of values—that are not far from practice! 

We actually need values, we need sentiments, we need feelings to make our practices viable, but also to figure out our practices. 

EA: Can I add a few things? I have so many thoughts.

As you two were talking—I mentioned earlier that I’ve been a vegetarian for a long time. Early on, I was fourteen or fifteen, I got really into Christian mysticism, specifically folks like Francis of Assisi, a big figure in Lebanese Catholicism especially, but also folks like Leo Tolstoy—The Kingdom of God Is Within You was a text that was in the house. In retrospect, I have always associated certain monasteries around where I grew up with the few people who, while they were living in capitalism because everyone is, they had a distance from it based on certain practices they were practicing every single day. Among the main ones were caring for the non-human (or the more-than-human, as I’ve been preferring to say more recently). Among those were the beekeepers. 

I’m thinking about it now, and you mentioned stories. I used to watch a lot of documentaries, I had a lot of David Attenborough DVDs—and they were effective to a certain extent, but I reflected on this in an episode with Margaret Killjoy and Aydın (who is another one of our co-hosts): the title of that episode was “Living Like the World Is Dying,” specifically because there was that contrast. It’s not just acknowledging that the world is dying, but specifically how to live as if you know this but you still want to live. It’s going against the grain in many ways. And the stories I grew up with, some of which were older traditions, others were children’s books, others were movies or animated series—the Ghibli movies were very big for me growing up because they had those elements to them. Princess Mononoke impacted me, added something to my relationship and how I was feeling towards nature or the more-than-human, in a way that David Attenborough’s documentaries couldn’t, because they were for the most part devoid of stories.

I think about it this way: there is a box set, and the last DVD is always about: The first nine chapters were about all the lovely things, and here is the last chapter, how we’re destroying everything. At some point I consumed so much of it that I just couldn’t take it anymore. It’s not that having too much information in itself was the problem; it’s that there was something missing. And that something missing is what we’re describing as sentimentality, emotions, the stories.

Later, I had lots of difficulties even going on hikes, because I would have these associations in my mind: This is going. This is being destroyed. This is dying. The more I would go out in nature, the more I had these associations, even though around me, physically, it wasn’t the main thing happening. I was missing the bees, I was not paying attention—missing the forest for the trees, let’s say. Good metaphor here. What got me back into feeling—because thinking was never the problem; I was preventing myself from feeling—was reading certain stories, especially Indigenous stories, that I got attached to.

You mentioned earlier, Anna, the Euro-American/Western way of treating nature, which is often: Nature is over there, and the way to do conservation is to reduce the human element, because the only thing we’re good at is destroying nature. I had that sense growing up, and in retrospect that’s what created the severance between myself and nature. And the Indigenous stories are the ones where I learned of the role of Indigenous folks in the Amazon, for example, that their view of themselves was not cynical, despite the fact that they were and still are frontline defenders. They still had a worldview, stories, mythology, religion, that gave them a vocabulary to deal with the End Times without losing hope.

In many ways that’s because they’ve already dealt with the End Times in the past—the arrival of Western colonization. It’s not something new. And their relationship with the land is not, The more humans there are, the more the land suffers, but that there is actually some kind of complementarity between the two and we can actually help the land in the same way the land helps us. That’s what, among other things, shifted my perspective on this.

LJ: I hear you. I would translate what you just said into a term that I coined and I’m really fond of, something I call eco-eschatology. The book is basically propounding, suggesting, recommending eco-eschatology as a stance, an effective stance, an involvement with the world that is ecologically-minded but has eschatology as the overall framework, within which each one of us is deeply implicated. It’s not just nature dying, it’s death that is really a lot of all things—we all are finite. 

In the Islamic tradition it’s very helpful, and it’s quite deliberate in the Quran and the hadiths, that death and the end of the world are always paired together—for various reasons, not least of which is perhaps to keep reminding ourselves that we are finite. With humans it’s very particular. In the Islamic perspective, the solution is never to get rid of humans. It’s not anthro-decentering in that sense. But it’s re-centering the human, and the definition and meaning of “human,” around the question of accountability.

The reason to keep your own death in mind is because living comes with great stakes. You’re supposed to do something really good with your life. Life is super precious. Life in general—God’s name is Hayy, Life; Sufis invoke Hayy, Hayy…God is Life, one of the Divine’s names is Life, and we are all part of Life, and it’s precious, it’s divine, it’s blessing—especially if we make use of it.

That kind of reminder—being eschatological is reminding yourself of your own finitude: You never know; the end is looming; death is looming. And the whole point is to prepare for it. That preparedness is something I call eschatological activism. With your own end in sight, you are striving to do the best you possibly can to contribute to the world, which is absolutely precious, and which is your connection to the meaning of life, connection to life. And the point of nurturing life is connection to meaning that gives meaning to life.

I’m trying to relate to what you were telling me.

EA: You did, thanks for that. I struggle to find the words to describe those emotions.

AM: I like the terms you’re bringing up here, Larisa, because they feel like how I experience both god and the world around me, and also human beings. I think there is value in understanding that life being precious comes with both responsibility and also deep meaning. The finite nature of it gives it meaning, but also gives us responsibility in doing something with that time.

Elia, you mentioned earlier that the churches around you were the single places you saw as being outside of a system—

EA: There are a couple specific monasteries I have in mind. I wouldn’t make the claim it was all of them, necessarily. There’s corruption in Lebanon, even there.

AM: For me, I didn’t grow up particularly religious, but I chose to get baptized and became more religious and faithful after spending significant amounts of time in Armenian monasteries, in Armenia. And basically all of them are built deeply connected with the natural world around them. The one that everybody visits when they come is one that is literally built into the stone—it is carved into the stone of the mountain that it is on. Others are similarly situated: on the edges of cliffs, in really high places; they’re always very connected to the land they’re on.

I don’t think it’s dissimilar from how you’re describing Sufism and the relationship between the spiritual, the folk, and the practical. Most Armenian tradition also grants special places to the world around us, but also recognizes our place in that natural world. I’m sitting in front of an Armenian rug right now; a very common symbol that is used in Armenian rugs is bees, but when you have bees in Armenian rugs you always have to surround them with symbols of flowers, because you can’t leave the bees with nothing to feed off of. You will see bees and people and donkeys, and they exist together. 

Rugs were a form of folk art, they were a form of folk memory. You can see the significance of each of these elements, but they have to exist in harmony together. Now, rugs are made and you can see that these symbols are disjointed, but even still, I was shopping for rugs recently and looking for a rug with bees on it, and immediately I saw that this tradition had been preserved. If there was a rug with bees on it and the hives were portrayed in the rug, the border was flowers. They have to be surrounded by flowers because they have to have somewhere to go.

I was very moved by what you were saying, Elia, about Indigenous cultures’ view of the natural world. That was the first thing I noticed with my aunt coming to this mountain. For her, the great sadness wasn’t just that she was so angry about the mine (which has been there for a while now), but even more she was very sad that there were no people on the mountain. She was deeply hurt and upset that there were no people on a mountain that was filled with communities. That was what made her most upset.

That story of destruction, or the End Times—she was a part of it; her community was a part of it; her family and village were all a part of it. And their absence was felt as much as the absence of certain plants, and felt as much as the absence of the bees swarming. She was seeing that very acutely, because to her, this was a part of the same thing.

EA: You mention the monasteries built on rocks. One of the most beautiful ones in Lebanon is also that. It’s in Qadisha Valley, near where Khalil Gibran grew up, actually, and it’s in one of his poems. I was doing a tour with a few friends of mine, and we were going to a bunch of different monasteries. One of them is where the first Arabic printing press was, and the second one is where the first Syriac press was. It was interesting to see both of those happened in monasteries. And in one of them, there is a story inscribed in one of the books they printed, and it was a story about bees.

I wish I had it somewhere. I don’t, I just remember the priest talking about it at the time.

LJ: That’s beautiful, and it makes me think a couple of things; this also goes back to Anna’s earlier point. There is much to be said about recuperating the lore, cosmologies, and stories from the monotheistic religions—Christianity, Judaism, Islam in particular—precisely because there is much disenchantment going there, and also because, for various reasons, they aren’t being paid enough attention to when it comes to ecology. There’s also a common sense, a sort of disgruntlement, among environmentalists particularly when it comes to Christianity—that they have for good reasons; Christianity is connected with missionarism and colonialism. 

There is good reason for skepticism and caution. But that’s no reason to discard these basic religions and traditions entirely, especially now as we ought to be trying to reinvigorate our relationship with the meaning of nature. 

And also not least because I think we really need faith. So much discourse connected to environmentalism, environmental disaster and climate disaster, is about hope. But hope is a very thin, speculative philosophical ground without faith in the picture—and it also does actually imply some sort of a faith, with all sorts of metaphysical assumptions that are rarely put on the table. Faith is essential to keeping hope and therefore practicing good things, ecologically, and scrambling our way out of disaster, even though the sky is nearly falling, and the stable climate is now nearly extinct.

This is what’s so beautiful about the rugs. I see the rug behind you; I love it. Those two black and two white patches within it remind me of bee queens. But it’s beautiful the way you’re describing the folk ecological common sense that bees cling to flowers. If you were looking further at these rugs I wonder if you would see even more assumptions about the elements—the air, the earth, the sky, the water. It’s woven into the fabric, it’s woven into the pattern, but it’s really a common sense ecological notion of the things that are inseparable.

AM: It’s more than that—not to derail fully on rugs, but I was at an Artsakh rug museum, of rugs that had been rescued from Artsakh under bombardment back in 2020, and this is where I learned about a lot of the bee symbolism that is found on rugs; those were rugs specifically from Shushi and from Artsakh. But one of the fascinating things is that the rugs included symbolism of bees and motherhood and the natural world, but on many of the same rugs, the symbols were interwoven together and there would be portrayals of heaven and hell; they would be right next to religious symbolism, because Armenian symbolism is deeply Christian.

You would find crosses that were interwoven into rosettes. For the people practicing this religion, for the people creating these rugs, many of whom were probably themselves either keeping bees or surrounded by those who keep bees, they were thinking about this. They put it in the same rug! They put it in one place. I don’t believe these are random symbols they put together just because they look pretty. 

If you look at these rugs—Armenian rug experts and hobbyists will talk about “reading a rug” to understand it. There is deep meaning to how these symbols are put together, and the fact that the religious, the Christian idea of salvation, was placed right next to the natural world, the very practical: the donkeys that carry your water, the bees that give you fruit, and the people that are then among all of these other creatures.

You would see all of that symbolism either in one rug or woven together in different rugs next to each other. There is just so much to gain from trying to read them and learn from them. I really think there is a lot of folk knowledge that’s contained in these forms of folk art. And not just rugs! There were dolls, there were so many things; each of them carry a deep meaning.

But I did want to transition, because you mentioned faith. I wanted to talk about the bigger picture of your book, because it is ultimately a book about prophecy and the end of the world. There’s this constant conversation among leftists about how to talk about climate without “burning out.” It’s a really weird conversation, because it actually echoes a rightwing talking point that was most popularly articulated by Jordan Peterson in one of his many deranged rants. He said the radical left is depressing the shit out of teenagers by telling them about climate change and the world is ending, and that the responsibility of depression and the ailing mental health among young people today is on the left, for emphasizing climate change.

But a weird interaction that I have very frequently in circles in the left is about how to talk about climate change, how to engage with it, without burning out. That’s fascinating to me, because in your book and in this conversation, we’ve seen that the monotheistic religions (and many others) all explicitly conceive of an End Times, they all talk about an End Times. So I’m wondering how you think we should be thinking about the end times and talking about it, and what role faith plays in talking about the end times. 

Not the least of reasons why we should be talking about this is because the End Times has been so cynically weaponized by many Christian communities (in the US at least) and used as a cudgel to beat people rather than an intricate part of faith. I wanted to put this question to you because this is ultimately what your book is leading to.

LJ: Believe it or not, even after all these years it’s not an easy question for me. My sister Azra and I made a film by the same title; we’ve spent many years and much time thinking through this, and telling many different stories across different media. And yet it’s never an easy question. But this is partly an answer to your question: it’s hard for me to even think about “burning out” on the subject if you take it that seriously. 

I’ll throw out a couple things I’m thinking about. If we could keep reaching out and staying in touch with the world out there, with that rock (with or without a monastery on it), with a patch of land, with thickets, with a bee that wanders into our house, whatever it takes—if nothing else, the wrecked climate is staging so many different events that are, whether we like it or not, going to be putting us in touch with deranged elements.

So we’ll have that kind of exposure, but I also think we should be seeking those kinds of exposures in order to stay in touch and stay attuned and stay watchful of what the world is going through. It’s not necessarily dying, but really reinventing radically its relationships with everything. Many species are now reinventing their relationships with one another, and with the elements. Everything is being re-sorted right now. So staying in touch, knowing that everything we hold dear hinges on that, is really important. 

That’s one short way not to burn out. That’s how it is for beekeepers. There’s no “burning out.” Every single season now, and day to day, is staging unexpected surprises, and they’ve got their bees to take care of. They are constantly on their toes. You hang on to something that you love dearly, and you do your best. Sometimes you get tired, but you don’t burn out. You just keep at it because it’s the thing you hold dearest, and it keeps fueling you. Think about war. Think about emergency situations. That’s how it feels. 

I mentioned I live in a mountaintop village, and that’s very good for me also. Because I’m with my bees, they keep me watchful, but also here I feel more exposed to the elements than I would have been in the city. One thing, for instance, that happened this summer, is a new pattern to the heatwaves. Now they’re starting much earlier—they started in early July—and they’re lasting much longer. We’re the second year into a drought; this has all kinds of implications for bees, forests, and flowers—but what’s new is that the water wells have dried up.

Basically now we’re getting water coming through the village pipeline, every second day for about fifteen minutes, because we haven’t had rain, until a few days ago, for a very long time. Second year of drought. So part of my daily schedule now is to go fetch water, to go seek out water on the mountain, from the water wells that have not yet dried out. We had three wells on our land, and pretty much all of them have dried out.

That’s just one way all of this—things have been happening with my bees, and this is another story, but also it’s coming even closer to home, because I can no longer count on this basic thing, water coming through my faucet. These are the ways. This is anecdotal, obviously, but this is a way to stay attuned to the emergency, to feel that it’s real.

The Islamic perspective, which I appreciate for many different reasons, does not allow for hopelessness. There’s no such thing. The Quran says that only the kafirun lose faith in the mercy and gentleness of the Nurturer (“Lord” is translated as “Nurturer” as well). Only those without faith. A kafir is one who covers up, who occludes something—in this case occludes God’s infinite gentleness, mercy, wisdom. It only takes occluding or minimizing, diminishing the possibilities that come from the source of all possibilities, in order to lose hope.

Faith is the antidote to hopelessness, to despair, to depression.

EA: This is an aside, but me and my partner have been thinking a lot about where we should live; neither of us are currently where we’re from, and where we’re moving to isn’t that either. But the place that we’re moving to, we have more communities there; we know more people there. We went through this back and forth about what we do with global warming, with security, with all of that stuff, and the place where we currently are is a rich country but there’s a lack of community. 

What concerns us, and one of the many reasons we made the decision to move to this other place, where the perception is that it has less stability than the place we’re currently at, is that the in place we’re currently at, when the shit hits the fan, when things get really bad, we are just dependent on what the responses are on the top and bottom—what the state decides to do, whether there are resources or not—and our own participation in it is very minimal.

We don’t feel like we have much agency; we’re not citizens, among many other reasons. Whereas the place where we’re going, despite the fact that we’re not citizens of that place either, we know many other people who have either similar backgrounds: they are migrants, they’ve experienced precarity, they’ve been thinking of the world in a different sense. A lot of people around us here have had a certain type of stability that I would describe as unhealthy. 

Not that stability itself is unhealthy, but this type of stability, here specifically, is unhealthy, because when there are what is perceived as “external” events—a drought, a storm that’s really bad—it makes the news, it might scare some folks here and there, but almost as quickly as it came, it’s forgotten. This reminds me, there was a very bad flood in Germany two or three years ago, and, I remember this very well, one of the women affected (she lost her home, an elderly woman) said, You don’t expect these things to happen here, you expect them to happen over there!

There’s a lot of that. It feels almost emotional: the inside of the house is protected, and we are in these cubicles, these units, and we interact with one another in this transactional way. Whereas, like what we are seeking, if you have more of a community, it’s more fluid, and also, maybe paradoxically, it’s more stable—because it doesn’t take stability for granted.

It reminded me, the way you were talking about being more on the front line—you see it faster. The important detail there is not that others won’t get to see it. They may see it later, it may not filter into their consciousness as fast; maybe they’ll have other emotional or mental processes that filter these thoughts of the end times or the apocalypse or global warming (This is a tomorrow problem!). But overall, although that feels like a good defense mechanism to not freak out, it makes us less capable of dealing with reality, at all, in the first place, let alone with global warming.

LJ: It’s a sense of immunity—stability gives a sense of immunity. And really, no one is immune to global climate change. Nation-states that are affluent, and have all kinds of technologies to prepare for crises—all these resources are actually limited when it comes to the inventiveness that is being staged now through global climate change. That sense of immunity is false, and it’s probably part of the reason why there is so little climate action that has made a difference or shifted our course when there was still time to meet the timelines and curb emissions and so forth.

That sense of immunity is also deeply related to the depression that you were talking about, Anna.

AM: Something that concerns me the most when I visit my family is the disconnection from self, in that there’s been a path placed before people (and this applies especially to former Soviet states) where progress and development are equated to a certain way of living and being, and I have noticed a progressive lack of interest in ways of being that predated us.

I didn’t know my family had this migratory pattern that we followed for I-don’t-even-know-how-long—but they’ve been living in the same village since at least the 1700s, so for that long they’d been migrating up that mountain in different seasons—not just to survive, but thrive, in order to live with the land that they were given.

I don’t mean for this to be a sentimentalist or backward-looking idea—Larisa, when you said you had moved back to your paternal village, that’s my dream. I would like to move back to this very same village and just keep bees and live there. But that’s my dream, a thing that I imagine would bring me a sense of joy and peace. I don’t know that everybody needs to want that or needs to see that in order to have a sense of what it means to be a person in the world, in order to have a sense of what it means to be a human being on and of the Earth.

What concerns me is the lack of interest in that. It’s not because I think everybody should be interested in the same things, it’s because there’s been nothing offered to replace it, or nothing offered to foster a connection to the land—that probably will look different ten years from now than it does today, and than it did ten years ago and a hundred years before that. I’m not suggesting that things should stay the same. But absent something else, absent a different offering of connection to land that is more than just I really enjoy hiking…absent that path, I’m concerned.

It’s for those reasons that I end up looking to ancestral or traditional ways of being, not because I think they’re the only ways of being, or the Platonic ideal of how we should be, but because sometimes I don’t know where else to look. And I wonder what we could offer people that isn’t only that—because I’m lucky. I’m very lucky that I’m able to walk to my paternal village and learn things about it (I’m not so lucky in my maternal village; I can’t set foot in it). Most people, understandably, don’t have that, for many different reasons. But I would hope that we are able live in a world where they can be connected to land and to the environment that nurtures them, without having to look to that.

LJ: I couldn’t agree more. Modernists tend to look with arrogance at traditions of all sorts. I think we can no longer afford that arrogance, to discard traditions—for all kinds of reasons. Going back to your rugs: there’s something precious and deeply ecological about the common sense that was woven in, thread by thread, and passed on through carpet stories.

There is so much about traditions that is worth revisiting, and also worth learning from as we try to re-mend our ways onwards. It’s not necessarily that we’re going to—again, climate change is staging so many surprises that it’s very difficult to tell what kinds of ways we’ll be figuring out through the trouble. But certainly we ought to be thinking back and thinking with the traditions that have registered and passed on something about the deep knowledge of these relationships.

I’m also thinking about bees and beekeepers now. Beekeepers have got this thick lore on the microclimates, niches, and preferences of different plants for moisture, temperature, soil quality; and preferences of insects for types of wind and so on—and all of this lore is super rich, very important, very telling, but at the same time now it is almost outdated and displaced because things are happening so fast. And yet these are the traditions that we ought to be salvaging, if nothing else at least for the sake of knowing the intricate matrix of things that now is being unraveled and that we are losing. 

You said something like, “on and of the Earth,” that we belong on and that we are of the Earth. This is really also vital for urban populations. We—jump on board with me!—are invoking the precious many ways, traditional but also yet-to-be-invented, of connecting our urban populations (many of them eagerly urban populations) to the many facts in which we are on and of Earth. That is absolutely vital to weathering the trouble, and waking to the fact that this is a big deal. No one is immune.

It’s not a lost battle. We don’t throw our hands up in the air. It is a battle that calls all of us to join in, and first of all start noticing, and then start caring, and for god’s sake, weeping, but also rejoicing at the opportunity to step up and do our share.

AM: I was going to ask if you had any final words for our listeners, but I’m not sure I can ask you to come up with anything more beautiful than what you just said.

Larisa, thank you so much for joining us today. It was such a pleasure and an honor, and honestly such a joy to talk to you, and get to talk about the amazing book that you wrote. 

Elia, would you like to sign us off?

EA: There’s a poem by Mahmoud Darwish. The sentence that is most often cited is, “Ala hathihi al-ard ma yastahiku alhayya;” On this Earth is what makes life worth living, and he goes on to list the things that make life worth living: the scent of bread in the morning, and so on. It’s a good encapsulation of this conversation.

Larisa, thanks for doing this. This was very precious.

LJ: It was my pleasure chatting with you. I hope this isn’t the last time we meet.