Emergence Magazine Podcast: Recent Episodes
Emergence Magazine
Emergence Magazine is an award winning magazine exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture and spirituality. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, author-narrated essays, contributor conversations, fiction, multipart series, and more. We feature new podcast episodes weekly on Tuesdays. It has always been a radical act to share stories during dark times. They are regenerative spaces of creation and renewal. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the earth, we look to emerging stories. In them we find the timeless connections between ecology, culture, and spirituality.
In a world rapidly spiraling into climate turmoil, will we reorient to welcome migration not only as a right, but a necessary human adaptation? In this week’s essay, writer Tristan McConnell ventures across Turkana in northwest Kenya, home of the Great Rift Valley: a place where some of our earliest ancestors emerged millions of years ago before dispersing in waves first across, and then out of the continent. As he discovers how deeply human movement, landscape, and survival are entwined, he wonders what such a place might remind us about who we truly are, and have always been. Read this story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How do words shape our world? In this week’s narrated essay, writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder visits the wind-sculpted dunes of Nebraska’s Sandhills, considering the prophecies that collided across the American Great Plains in the nineteenth century. Tracing the histories of violence, conquest, and degradation that have played out there, Chelsea locates the points at which human and wilderness were separated. Wondering what words, what prophetic voices are needed to guide us out of an entrenched dualism, she calls us to remember that we have always been intimately linked with the cycles of our ecosystems. Read this essay on our website. Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How might our human systems work differently if they were adapted to receive input from the nonhuman creatures they involve and impact? In this week’s narrated essay, writer and ethicist Melanie Challenger considers what it would take to expand the democratic imagination to include and represent animal voices in the decisions that affect them. Advocating for a quieting of our own narratives so that we might recognize political signals from the behaviors of the vast community around us, she envisions the revolutionary mechanisms which could make present the expressions of animals within our systems of power. Read this story on our website. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Histories are enduring presences. No matter how deeply they are buried, they remain. In this week’s narrated essay, author Lauret E. Savoy meditates on the history of the Chesapeake region and the vestiges of collision and rupture that continue to mark its physical and cultural terrains. Surfacing ancient geological movements alongside the deliberate construction of race in colonial America, she considers the entwinement of tectonic and human histories—the ancestral structures that remain in plain sight and out of view. Read this essay on our website. Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As rapid warming, pollution, habitat destruction, and insidious violence against other species speeds up the rate of extinction and edges ecosystems ever-closer to collapse, what voids are left in the tapestry of the living world? In this short story, novelist Lydia Millet imagines the plight of the last remaining Tasmanian tiger—a creature caught in the crosshairs of Australia’s settler narrative, eventually hunted to the point of extinction. As a man seeks the company of the tiger, housed in a failing zoo, he summons the courage to care for what remains amid an overwhelming sorrow for what has been lost. Read this story on our website. Find "Thylacine" and other "Short Stories of Apocalypse," in our inaugural print fiction collection. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this audio experience by biologist and acclaimed author David George Haskell, we are invited to be attentive to the songs and stories that thrum in the air around us. Hearing three billion years of our planet’s sound evolution—a lineage of language—in the trills, hoops, barks, bugles, clicks, and pulses of the life around him, David shares the connection to both deep time and the more-than-human world that can be found when we tune in to the Earth’s orchestra. Made entirely of the tiny trembling waves in air, the fugitive, ephemeral energy that we call sound, this experience combines human speech with other voices to immerse our senses and imaginations in the generative, provoking, and unifying power of sound. If you enjoy this audio story, check out David’s companion practice, Playful Listening, which invites you to immerse yourself in the sonic world around you. And listen to our interview with David, “Listening and the Crisis of Inattention” on our website. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this story, Diné poet and author Jake Skeets honors the food traditions that have sustained his people since time immemorial. As he prepares to butcher a sheep for Kinaałda, a Diné puberty ceremony of family and song, Jake contemplates reclaiming culture and restoring the relationships between people and land, food and community. Summoning the experiences that have shaped his own kinship with food, he puts forth story as a pathway to food sovereignty, reminding us that “the beauty of the beyond and the beauty of the world” come together in each bite. Read this story on our website. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“Joy is our lives mattering, / Blackness respected.” Juneteenth is a day to celebrate and defend freedom, equity, and belonging for Black Americans. In this stirring reading of his poem “Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves,” poet, birder, and naturalist J. Drew Lanham grounds his vision of racial justice in quiet moments of awe among the more-than-human. Embracing radical acts of joy and creativity, he lifts up liberation, reparations, and deep connection to ancestors and the living world. Read this poem on our website. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this week’s narrated essay, cultural ecologist and geophilosopher David Abram conjures the impossible movements of Alaskan salmon, sandhill cranes, and monarch butterflies on their annual migrations, marveling at the reciprocal interactions that guide these creatures across the wider body of the Earth. What if, David asks, we understood migration as emerging from a conversation—a spontaneous reciprocity—between migrating creatures and the environments they migrate within? How might we humans, whose senses have coevolved with the enfolding biosphere, begin to recognize ourselves, too, as expressions of the animate, breathing Earth? Read this essay on our website. Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alexis Wright is an Australian Aboriginal author and member of the Waanji people from the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. As the world falters, threatening native ecosystems and Indigenous lifeways, Alexis turns inward to the dwelling place of ancestral story. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Experience “Chapter Four: Futures.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As we look to an uncertain future, what systems of exchange might we embrace that support and deepen our interdependence? In this essay, Potawatomi scientist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, considering the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Experience “Chapter Four: Futures.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this meditative exploration, Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder witnesses her daughter learning to speak and wonders how to listen for a language of mothering that is in service to all of life’s beings. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Experience “Chapter Four: Futures.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Suzanne Simard is known for her groundbreaking research on the belowground fungal networks that connect trees and facilitate inter-tree communication and interaction. We continue to explore Futures this week with another story on motherhood—this time within the world of trees. In this interview, Suzanne discusses her book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest and shares her latest research on how Mother Trees recognize and support their kin. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Experience “Chapter Four: Futures.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Julian Hoffman lives in a mountain village beside the Prespa lakes in northwestern Greece. He is the author of The Small Heart of Things and Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save Our Wild Places. In this piece, Julian witnesses the drastic decline of Dalmatian pelicans nesting on the Prespa lakes as they succumb to the recent outbreak of avian influenza. As the wetlands fall strangely quiet, he senses the porous boundaries between our health and that of the ecologies we inhabit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We close our exploration of the theme of Roots by taking a step into joy. This week, we bring you another piece by birder and writer J. Drew Lanham. In this powerfully recited poem, Drew celebrates the radical act of joy through lifting up liberation, reparations, justice, and deep connection to ancestors and the living world. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Three: Roots.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This three-part series is the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their home and one woman’s determination to bring the living history of her family back to the land. This final episode traces the Spanish missions, boarding schools, and ranching empires that drove many Coast Miwok people from their ancestral land in Northern California and shares Theresa Harlan’s continuing grassroots efforts to protect the last standing structures on Tomales Bay built by Coast Miwoks. Originally released on February 8, 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This three-part series is the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family's eviction from their ancestral home—on a cove in Tomales Bay in Northern California—and one woman's effort to bring the living history of her family back to the land. In Episode Two we learn that the Coast Miwok culture predates the geological formation of the San Francisco Bay. In tracing thousands of years of Indigenous presence and history, all the way through the oppressive colonial systems that have become today's mainstream culture, this episode asks: Who gets to define history? Originally released on February 1, 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Across the United States, Indigenous communities are calling for sweeping revisions to stories commonly told as “history”—stories that, even today, neglect and erase Indigenous peoples and serve as justification for continued ownership of stolen Indigenous lands. This three-part series is the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their ancestral home in Northern California and one woman’s mission to bring the living history of her family back to the land. Throughout this series, Theresa Harlan chronicles the story of her family’s displacement from their homestead on a cove in Tomales Bay and shares her grassroots efforts to involve the wider community in protecting both the history and the future of this place. As she tells her family's story, Theresa makes a powerful claim: remembering and retelling inclusive histories has the power to create a more just future. In this series we ask: Who gets to define history? In what ways is it our responsibility to ensure that a shared history is an accurate and just representation of the places we call home? In Episode 1, Theresa Harlan shares the story of her Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their homestead on a cove in Tomales Bay—an uprooting which ended her family’s time there but did not sever their connection to the ancestral lands and waters of Tamal-liwa. Originally released on January 25, 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How can stories return us to what is essential as we navigate an uncertain future? In this conversation with Amitav Ghosh, author of The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, he calls on storytellers to lead us in the necessary work of collective reimagining—decentering human narratives and re-centering stories of the land. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Three: Roots.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How do we root ourselves in times of isolation and disorientation? As birder and writer J. Drew Lanham encounters his backyard during the pandemic lockdown, he designates it as a newly sanctioned “wild-like refuge”—a place that is brimming with life as he notices the wildlife that inhabits the nearby faraway. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Three: Roots.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We begin Chapter Three with a story that explores language as a technology capable of transforming our lived realities. As a Native scholar and poet, Jake Skeets considers the necessary interrogation of colonial naming and narratives, and how the Indigenous application of writing as a technology can reshape our world as we move into an unknown future. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Three: Roots.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This sonic journey written and narrated by David G. Haskell brings us to the beginning of sound and song on planet Earth. The experience is made entirely of tiny trembling waves in air, the fugitive, ephemeral energy that we call sound. Spoken words combined with terrestrial sounds invite our senses and imaginations to go outward into an experience of the living Earth and its history. How did the vast and varied chorus of modern sounds—from forest to oceans to human music—emerge from life’s community? When did the living Earth first start to sing? We invite you on a journey into deep time and deep sound that will open your ears and your imagination. If you enjoy this audio story, check out David’s new companion practice, Playful Listening, which invites you to immerse yourself in the sonic world around you. Available on the Emergence Magazine website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Daegan Miller is the author of This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent. In this essay, Daegan visits the tree that marks the thousandth westward mile of the Transcontinental Railroad and considers how our historical landmarks have shifted in meaning, leaving us adrift and disoriented in the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Around the world, trees are on the move. Last year we published a special multimedia story told from the perspectives of four native tree species that explores what is at stake for both ecological and human communities as forests migrate. In this re-release of “They Carry Us With Them,” Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder narrates the feature story, chronicling the possible disappearance of the black ash tree from the state of Maine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In our final installment on the theme of Ashes from Chapter Two of Living with the Unknown, we enter a fictional world dominated by the monotony and tireless momentum of greed. In this short story from Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason, time expands and collapses as an architect in Reykjavíik struggles against the soulless design of urban landscapes in the Anthropocene.
Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Two: Ashes.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Acclaimed poet Camille T. Dungy bears witness to an encounter between a man and an elephant. In an effort to make sense of a world in which so much has been lost, this poem offers us the opportunity to step into a moment where past harm gives way to an expansive recognition of love. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Two: Ashes.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay, Daisy Hildyard, a scholar of the history of science, examines three stories of atrocity and considers how whiteness has inscribed itself onto the land through violence. In what ways, she asks, does human history blur into the nonhuman world and into the present moment? Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Two: Ashes.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay, writer and journalist Anna Badkhen brings us into histories of imperial collapse. As we continue our exploration of the theme of Ashes and what it means to live in a moment of unraveling, she asks: How do we come to terms with the world we have made? How do we make space for hope and sanctuary? Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Two: Ashes.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This month we move from Initiation into Ashes with five stories from Chapter Two. When so much has been stripped away, how do we bear witness to ruin? How do we continue to be present with that which remains? We begin with the sudden disappearance of the bogong moth in alpine Australia. As writer Rebecca Giggs traces the moths journey from superabundance to apocalypse, she considers how very small beings are often responsible for vast surges of life. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Two: Ashes.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay, Cal Flyn observes new species of butterflies arriving in Scotland's Orkney Islands. As plants and animals migrate northwards on an unprecedented scale, she faces the haunting knowledge that some voices are rising as others fade away. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We invited Oscar-nominated composer Volker Bertelmann, also known as Hauschka, to create a unique companion to the stories in our third volume, Living with the Unknown. The resulting four-part score is a cinematic and introspective experience, and a compelling counterpart for the journey into the unknown. When we first spoke to Volker about the issue’s themes—Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures—he said he felt like they were describing a life circle and the course of creativity. Deep crises and collapses, he said, are necessary steps in evolution. His score evokes this circle, taking the listener through the questions about transformation that we’re exploring in this issue—and more broadly as a magazine. This week, we’re excited to share the soundtrack of Living with the Unknown. Sit back and enjoy this contemplative sonic experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Amid the cacophony of a cicada emergence, our final narrated essay on the theme of Initiation follows a movement into new rhythms and patterns of becoming. While immersed in a unified chorus of insect voices, playwright and director Anisa George reflects on her departure from the Bahá’í faith and its promise of a new civilization, choosing instead to embark on her own path. Sounds provided by David Rothenberg.
Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter One: Initiation”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week, as our journey into Initiation continues, Sufi teacher and author Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee invites us to cross a threshold. Witnessing how humanity is tearing apart the web of life, he calls us to return our awareness to a fully animate world and to the deep ecology of consciousness we once held. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter One: Initiation.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this interview from our archive, Buddhist eco-philosopher and author Joanna Macy discusses her life and work. From her anti-nuclear activism in the late 1960s to her work with deep ecology, Joanna expresses the need to live within an ethic of care for the earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay from our archive, poet and essayist Lia Purpura considers the processes which transform bodies from one state to another and the beginnings that emerge from endings. When she encounters the decomposing body of a deer, she witnesses the forces of restoration at play and wonders what constitutes stories of “rightness.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Initiation, chapter one of Living with the Unknown, begins where all inquiries into the unknown begin: with myth. In this narrated essay, Martin Shaw provides a mythological framework for forging new paths, calling upon different intelligences, and committing acts of sacred transgression as we walk our questions into a troubled future. Over the coming months, we’ll continue to release narrated stories from Emergence, Volume 3, as we ask: What does living in an unfolding apocalyptic reality look like? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sam Lee is a Mercury Prize–nominated folk singer, a song collector, and the author of The Nightingale: Notes on a Songbird. We spoke with Sam last year in the midst of England’s nightingale season about the transformative experience of creating songs in collaboration with a songbird. As part of a new documentary series that will be released next year, we're heading to the UK to experience Sam singing with the nightingales firsthand. In the meantime, we are revisiting this special conversation: one filled with song, as well as the stories of ancestors that are passed through folk music and the space for communion that is opened with silence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Long, long ago—before there were trees, before there were flowers, before life existed outside of the churning oceans—mosses bravely ventured onto dry land. In this special Earth Week episode Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, takes a long view of life on Earth, exploring how mosses—ancient beings who transformed the world—can teach us strategies for persisting amid a changing climate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In honor of Earth Week we’re revisiting our conversation from last year with Dr. Suzanne Simard, the renowned scientist whose groundbreaking research, widely known as “the wood-wide web,” demonstrated how trees communicate and exchange resources through networks of mycorrhizal fungi within the soil. In this interview, Suzanne speaks about the urgent implications of our evolving understanding of the interdependent nature of forests for healing the rift between ourselves and the living world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
At her home in Siliguri, India, writer and poet Sumana Roy collects the trunks, roots, and branches of fallen trees and affectionately places them in the rooms of her house—admiring their life even in death. In this narrated essay, Sumana and her nephew debate whether the dead trunks can be revived by the element of water and reflect on the continuance of all that has vanished from our sight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay, Boyce Upholt travels to the US-Mexico border, where the O’odham peoples have long revered the saguaro cactus as a being with personhood—a belief that is congruous with the recent rights-of-nature movement. As legal protections for the cactus come up against the push to build a wall through Organ Pipe Cactus National Park, Boyce meets with elders from the Tohono O’odham Nation who are acting on behalf of the rooted beings of the desert. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay, Jori ventures out from her home in Dakar, Senegal, drawn to the wisdom and resiliency of Africa’s baobab trees: ancient arks of biodiversity that have migrated across the landscape, enduring for millennia. As many of the oldest trees have died and younger ones struggle to survive, Jori bears witness to these elders in a rapidly changing world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay for our ongoing series on migration, Anna Badkhen asks: When does a journey begin? As she encounters people traveling north of the Ethiopian capital who are looking for a means of escape, she considers failed migrations when the forces of climate catastrophe and colonial greed combine to trap the world’s most vulnerable populations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay, environmental philosopher Melanie Challenger examines the belief in human exceptionalism that has devastated life on this planet, and wonders if our desire to outrun death is hindering our capacity to love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narration of his essay, birder and naturalist J. Drew Lanham imagines an exchange of letters between Henry David Thoreau and John James Audubon, two pillars of conservation: one who extended his love of nature to care for a fellow human, and one who did not. Through this discourse, Drew asks: In the ongoing response to racism, how might reckoning with history help us to widen our field of view and weave better futures? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This sonic journey written and narrated by David G. Haskell brings us to the beginning of sound and song on planet Earth. The experience is made entirely of tiny trembling waves in air, the fugitive, ephemeral energy that we call sound. Spoken words combined with terrestrial sounds invite our senses and imaginations to go outward into an experience of the living Earth and its history. How did the vast and varied chorus of modern sounds—from forest to oceans to human music—emerge from life’s community? When did the living Earth first start to sing? We invite you on a journey into deep time and deep sound that will open your ears and your imagination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narration of her essay, writer and poet Makshya Tolbert wades into the liminal, haunted space that exists between water and Black memory. As she navigates Black lineages of thinking and practice, she comes to the meeting place of past and present, life and death, slavery and freedom, and embarks on her own return to water. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In honor of the passing of Buddhist monk and Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, we republished his Ten Love Letters to the Earth, a series of meditations that engage us in intimate conversation with the living world. Here, Emergence Executive Editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee reads all ten letters for our podcast. Composed as a living dialogue, they are even more potent when recited. We invite you to read them aloud yourself, joining your voice to Thich Nhat Hanh's call to fall in love with the Earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Spanish missions, boarding schools, and ranching empires in California drove many Coast Miwok people from their ancestral land, targeting the erasure of their history and identity. This three-part series is the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their home and one woman’s determination to bring the living history of her family back to the land. In Episode Three, Theresa Harlan continues her grassroots efforts to protect the last standing Coast Miwok structures on Tomales Bay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This three-part series is the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family's eviction from their ancestral home—on a cove in Tomales Bay in Northern California—and one woman's effort to bring the living history of her family back to the land. In Episode Two we learn that the Coast Miwok culture predates the geological formation of the San Francisco Bay. In tracing thousands of years of Indigenous presence and history, all the way through the oppressive colonial systems that have become today's mainstream culture, this episode asks: Who gets to define history? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Across the United States, Indigenous communities are calling for sweeping revisions to stories commonly told as “history”—stories that, even today, neglect and erase Indigenous peoples and serve as justification for continued ownership of stolen Indigenous lands. This three-part series is the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their ancestral home in Northern California and one woman’s mission to bring the living history of her family back to the land. Throughout this series, Theresa Harlan chronicles the story of her family’s displacement from their homestead on a cove in Tomales Bay and shares her grassroots efforts to involve the wider community in protecting both the history and the future of this place. As she tells her family's story, Theresa makes a powerful claim: remembering and retelling inclusive histories has the power to create a more just future. In this series we ask: Who gets to define history? In what ways is it our responsibility to ensure that a shared history is an accurate and just representation of the places we call home? In Episode 1, Theresa Harlan shares the story of her Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their homestead on a cove in Tomales Bay—an uprooting which ended her family’s time there but did not sever their connection to the ancestral lands and waters of Tamal-liwa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this essay Camille reflects on the journey of seeds, how much of what we plant in our gardens was brought to our soils during the slave trade, and the legacy of trauma and triumph that lies within our food. Planting food, she contends, even in contaminated soils, becomes both an acknowledgment of grief and a celebration of the beauty of growing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week we are revisiting our interview with cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram where he discusses the animism, power, and potency of the living world. In our current moment of ecological and societal instability he calls on us to remember our inherent participation in the collective, embodied flesh of the Earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this essay, Fred Bahnson, author of Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith, offers a tribute to the preeminent nature writer Barry Lopez. Originally published in Notre Dame Magazine, we are republishing “An Unbroken Grace” to commemorate the first anniversary of Barry’s death. In 2018, Fred spent several days with Barry at his longtime home in Finn Rock, Oregon, along the McKenzie River. As he recalls the time that the two spent together beneath old growth Douglas firs, Fred reflects on the life of this great writer whose numinous encounters and lifelong adoration of mystery informed his practice of living in service to the power of story as a way to illuminate and heal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tristan McConnell is a writer who spent years working as a foreign correspondent in Nairobi. In this essay, Tristan ventures across the rugged landscape of Turkana in northwest Kenya, home of Kenya’s Rift Valley: the place where, millions of years ago, our first human ancestors emerged and then dispersed in waves out of the continent. Present-day Turkana is a place that continues to be defined by human migration. As Tristan meets with archaeologists, pastoralists, and activists, he considers the ways in which Turkana’s long story is still being written. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As we approach the longest night of the year, we invite you to find a few moments of quiet to tune in to this re-broadcast of recitations from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God. In his seminal collection of poems, the great twentieth-century poet explores the nature of—and his relationship to—God through divinely “received” prayers. Twenty-five years ago, Anita Barrows, an award-winning poet and translator, and Joanna Macy, a Buddhist scholar and eco-philosopher, collaborated to translate this collection. On the album Be Earth Now, produced by Fletcher Tucker at Gnome Life Records, Anita and Joanna recite a selection of these poems. Through their potent recitations, they bring the spirit of Rilke’s words fully into our time and remind us of the ever-urgent call to love the world into being. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Amitav Ghosh is an Indian-born scholar, novelist, and nonfiction writer. His many books include The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, in which he explores our imaginative failure in an age of ecological crisis. In this interview, Amitav speaks about his newest book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, and how the widespread silencing of nonhuman voices is deeply entangled in capitalism and the geopolitical structures that sustain it. Storytellers, he says, must lead us in the necessary work of collective reimagining: decentering human narratives and re-centering stories of the land. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this in-depth interview, Rowen White shares what seeds—her greatest teachers—have shown her: that resilience is rooted in diversity, and that all of us carry encoded memories of how to plant and care for seeds. As we prepare to gather around our tables for Thanksgiving, we are re-sharing this conversation from 2019 as an invitation to honor and remember the embodied histories and relationships that are carried by the foods that nourish us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This month we released a special multimedia feature exploring the migration of trees and what is at stake for both ecological and human communities as forests move. Following up from last week's story on black ash, staff writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder shares three tree migration vignettes: sugar maple, paper birch, and red spruce. Each offers a glimpse of just one aspect of tree migration: nourishment, forest succession, and industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This month we released a special multimedia feature exploring the migration of trees and what is at stake for both ecological and human communities as forests move. This week we hear from staff writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder as she narrates her feature story, They Carry Us With Them, about the potential disappearance of the black ash tree from the state of Maine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As part of a new Emergence series, we’re publishing a selection of essays from Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations—a five-volume collection edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer. Diane Wilson is a writer, speaker, editor, and the Executive Director for the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance. She is the author of The Seed Keeper; Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past; and Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life. In this essay, Diane asks what it means to be a good relative to the land as she endeavors to restore balance between the native and invasive plants around her home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dara McAnulty is a teenage autistic author, naturalist, and conservationist from Northern Ireland. After several years of writing his blog, Naturalist Dara, he published his debut book, Diary of a Young Naturalist, when he was fourteen years old. The book won the 2020 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, and Book of the Year for the Narrative Non-fiction British Book Awards in 2021. In this interview, Dara, now seventeen, speaks about his book and his approach to living a life immersed in and guided by the living world. Wise beyond his years, Dara speaks about his identity as an autistic person, the solace and comfort he has always found in nature, the role of the artist in envisioning a different future, and the great necessity of staying rooted in joy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As part of a new Emergence series, we’re publishing a selection of essays from Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations—a five-volume collection edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer—including this poignant essay from Richard Powers. Richard is the author of twelve novels, including the newly released Bewilderment, and The Overstory, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. In this essay, as he reflects on whether there is a genetic basis for altruism, Richard arrives at story as the vehicle through which human beings can find kinship with other creatures—recognizing and remembering our shared narrative in the urgent drama of this moment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Catherine Bush is the author of five novels, including Blaze Island, Accusation, and Claire’s Head. She is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Guelph and divides her time between Toronto and the countryside of eastern Ontario. In this essay, Catherine tends to the understory in a time of mounting ecological loss. As invasive plants proliferate in a park near her childhood home in Toronto, she considers her family’s own history as transplanted immigrants and how acts of reciprocity and care for the land might unknit despair. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We’re featuring this episode from our Language Keepers podcast series in honor of Marie Wilcox, the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language and the creator of the first and only Wukchumni dictionary. On Saturday, September 25, 2021, Marie passed away at the age of 88. Marie was a remarkable woman who was deeply committed to her family, the Wukchumni language, and to the Native language revitalization movement. She worked tirelessly for years to ensure the survival of her language, an effort that will serve her family and community for generations to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jack Dash and Luke Swenson are the creators of Atascosa Borderlands, a visual storytelling project combining botanical survey, oral history, and documentary photography to explore the Atascosa Highlands: an ecological crossroads that straddles the US and Mexico border in the Sonoran Desert. This piece documents Jack and Luke’s recent visit to the Highlands, where ancient populations of silverleaf oak, saguaro, and sweet acacia grow with no sense that the land around them is divided. But as the border wall imposes a hard boundary, this island of biodiversity faces an increasingly fragmented future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian, specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. In this essay, Bathsheba accompanies a Gwitchin friend on a moose hunt north of the Arctic Circle, and witnesses patterns of contrasting stories manifested in the landscape: one of conquest and inattention seen in collapsing river banks and melting permafrost; and another of restraint, held in the quiet knowing of the moose. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week we’re featuring a favorite interview from our archives: Emergence Executive Editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee’s conversation with the acclaimed British writer Robert Macfarlane. The two originally spoke in 2019, as part of our language-themed issue, in a conversation that explored the lyrical relationship between language and landscapes, and the consequence, responsibility, and the pleasure of naming the living world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Charles Foster is a writer, barrister, and traveler. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide and The Screaming Sky. In this essay, Charles considers his role as a writer seeking to experience and express communion with the more-than-human world, and begins to wonder if language can do anything other than constrain and tame the tangled wild. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Natalie Rose Richardson is a poet and writer who was born in New York City to a long line of border-crossers and proud people of blended heritage. In this essay, Natalie searches for her great-grandfather’s grave in a historically segregated cemetery and confronts the American notion of paradise as an ideology which imposes walls of separation onto the multilayered landscape—allowing some in and keeping others out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
J. Drew Lanham is a birder, naturalist, and hunter-conservationist. He is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. In this powerful reading, Drew recites his poem Joy is the Justice we Give Ourselves, a celebration of the radical act of joy through lifting up liberation, reparations, justice, and deep connection to ancestors and the living world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Stephen Lezak is a PhD Candidate in the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. His work focuses on the politics of climate change in the context of communities and landscapes in the North American Arctic. In this essay, Stephen explores the paradoxical human narratives that overlay the Arctic landscape—a frontier, a paradise, a marker of our destruction of the planet—as he bears witness to a place that is teetering in an uneasy balance between eternity and loss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As the pandemic begins to ebb and we begin to emerge from a difficult and transformative year, we are taking a moment to pause as the warmth of summer and the cool shade of trees—here in the Northern Hemisphere—beckons to us. Kimberly Ruffin is a Certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide and author of Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions. As a companion to Kimberly’s past Emergence essay “Bodies of Evidence,” she created a guided practice of walking through the forest. For Kimberly, faith is a continuous exchange of belonging, an experience that’s palpable among trees. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Gina Rae La Cerva is a geographer, environmental anthropologist, and the author of Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food. In this essay, Gina Rae revisits her grandfather’s recipes in order to trace the elements of her Sicilian heritage. Through legacies of wild food gathering and feasting, she seeks to embody the traditions that have brought her family joy and sustenance, even in times of grief, conquest, and migration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nick Hunt is a writer, journalist, and storyteller, and the author of Walking the Woods and the Water and Where the Wild Winds Are. In this essay, Nick ventures into the Forest of Dean, an ancient mixed woodland, where he searches for the unruly, twilight realm of the boar—a creature who brings him to the boundary between wildness and civilization, history and myth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Heather Swan is a poet, writer, and beekeeper. She is the author of Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field. In this essay, Heather travels to Columbia, where nearly fifty percent of the country’s 4,300 native species of orchid are endangered. As the Colombian people and landscape continue to recover from a half century of civil war, she meets one family who is pursuing restoration and resiliency by cultivating native orchids and returning them to the wild. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this interview, which weaves conversation, song, and the music of nightingales, folk singer Sam Lee speaks about the transformative experience of collaborating with nightingales, the stories of ancestors passed through folk music, and the space for communion that is opened with silence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee is a writer and Sufi teacher whose work focuses on spiritual responsibility in our present time of transition. His many books include A Handbook for Survivalists: Caring for the Earth, A Series of Meditations. In this essay, as Llewellyn witnesses the growing wasteland that we are creating, he seeks the threshold that could bring us back to the place where the land sings—a deep ecology of consciousness that returns our awareness to a fully animate world. Photo by Bear Guerra. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David Farrier is the author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, a meditation on the Anthropocene and a search for the fossils that humans are leaving behind. In this essay, David reflects on the material weight of human-made objects and on the home as a structure that holds and records the trace of our presence on the Earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hala Alyan is a clinical psychologist, poet, and author. In this essay she reluctantly steps into the realm of fear in order to reckon with a precarious world. In the context of the pandemic and personal loss and trauma, she explores the psychology of being afraid, the presence of demons, and practices of courage and surrender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the face of present-day environmental catastrophe and social injustice, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates examine opposing narratives of survival in the story of Noah’s Ark, exemplified in the dove and the raven. While one symbolizes an exclusionary new world with a finite narrative arc and an inevitable conclusion, the other embodies the unexpected and unscripted—a widened refuge open to all. The contrasting fate of the birds prompts these two medieval scholars to consider how we will respond when our own survival is called into question. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this in-depth interview, Dr. Suzanne Simard—the renowned scientist who discovered the “wood-wide web”—speaks about mother trees, kin recognition, and how to heal our separation from the living world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David G. Haskell is the author of “The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors” and “The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature.” In this narrated essay originally published in 2019, David enters the intricate and generative soundscape of the world of birds, inviting us to join in a practice of cross-species listening as a bridge to kinship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In celebration of Earth Day, we are resharing the podcast adaptation of our award-winning virtual reality experience, Sanctuaries of Silence, an immersive listening journey into the Hoh Rainforest, one of the quietest places left in North America. In this experience we join acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton as he guides us in reconnecting with the silence filling this ancient forest and shares what is lost when that silence is filled with noise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this essay, conservation scientist Lauren Oakes listens to three generations of an Iñupiat family in Kotzebue, Alaska, discuss the transformations and losses in their community—located thirty miles north of the Arctic Circle—that have resulted from climate change and COVID-19. As she reflects on what will be needed to build resilience in the face of an uncertain future, Lauren considers the meeting place of scientific knowledge and Indigenous ways of knowing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In Rainer Maria Rilke’s seminal collection of poetry, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, the great twentieth-century poet explores the nature of—and his relationship to—God through divinely "received" prayers. Nearly twenty-five years ago, Anita Barrows, an award-winning poet and translator, and Joanna Macy, a Buddhist scholar and eco-philosopher, collaborated to translate this collection. Now, on the new album Be Earth Now, produced by Fletcher Tucker at Gnome Life Records, Anita and Joanna recite a selection of these poems. Through their potent recitations, they bring the spirit of Rilke’s words fully into our time and remind us of the ever-urgent call to love the world into being. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Arati Kumar-Rao ventures into a forested river gorge in the hidden land of Pemakö, which exists deep within the heart of the Tibetan Buddhist belief system. Intersected by the sacred waters of the Yarlung Tsangpo river, and its tributary the Yang Sang Chu, Pemakö has long been considered impenetrable and prophesied as a place that will one day regenerate and renew the world. But, as Arati learns, this prophecy is now confronted by the persistent grind of industry that threatens to invade this promised land. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Andri Snær Magnason is an Icelandic writer and documentary filmmaker. In this interview, Andri discusses his book On Time and Water and our relationship to time in an age of ecological crisis. With Iceland having lost its first large glacier, the Ok glacier, this past summer—Andri discusses the ways in which geological time is beginning to move at the speed of human time. In order to bring about a planetary paradigm shift, he says, we need new ways to see and imagine ourselves into the future. This interview was originally released on the Emergence Podcast on December 9th, 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this essay, Boricua author Jamie Figueroa brings her pen to the blank pages of her family’s history, exploring writing as a tool of revelation and healing in confronting a legacy of generational trauma and assimilation into a white colonialist culture. “You’re left with an accumulation of blanks, superficial displays you know better than to trust. I am magnetized to what is behind and beneath. I excavate with my pen.” As she works to uncover the inherited wounds of her ancestors housed in her own bodily cells, she also reaches for a deeper remembering—writing her way into the landscapes and the cultural memories that bring together the pieces of her identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Anna Badkhen is a writer and essayist who has written about a dozen wars on three continents and has spent most of her life in the Global South. Her books include Fisherman’s Blues: A West African Community at Sea and Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah. In this narrated essay, Anna embarks on a weeklong journey across the Sahara desert, tracing the ancient route that pilgrims once caravanned from the Atlantic coast to Mecca. Along the way, she contemplates human movement across shifting landscapes, the impermanence of memory, and what remains eternal in the face of erasure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In pursuit of a contemplative inner life amid a world in upheaval, Fred Bahnson looks to the early desert monks for guidance on how to direct our gaze and maintain an attentive heart. As he ponders the role of prayer, he considers the individual and collective healing it can offer. “Those seconds of stillness, those brief moments when we glimpse purity of heart, can add up to hours, days, months, even years of our life,” he writes. “Until one day they become our life.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Whenever an earthquake strikes Japan, the myth of the giant catfish Ōnamazu reminds people that the living world is full of complex meaning. In the face of repeated natural disasters, Marie Mutsuki Mockett looks to her mother’s homeland to recall stories that could change our relationship with what we call “nature.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rachel Carson had met? Imagining an exchange in the year 1964, as the civil rights and environmental movements were forging parallel and increasingly urgent paths into American culture, J. Drew Lanham explores the power and necessity of convergence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As the world falters, threatening native ecosystems and Indigenous lifeways, acclaimed Australian Aboriginal author Alexis Wright turns inward to the dwelling place of ancestral story. From here, she considers how her ancient culture has responded to ongoing destruction—and how to bear witness to the creation of a post-apocalyptic world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Born in Battambang, Cambodia, during the Khmer Rouge regime, Kalyanee Mam immigrated to the United States in 1981 with her family. In this narrated essay, Kalyanee traces her father’s struggle for agency and acceptance in America against the backdrop of the false promise of the American Dream. As she reflects on her father’s death—“from pain and heartache for a homeland he could never return to and the disappointment of a dreamland where he would never be accepted”—she considers her Cambodian heritage, her upbringing in the United States, and the deep belonging that can be found when one is anchored in ancestry and homeland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Even as the pandemic has isolated us from one another, it has also revealed new paths into deeper communion with and connection to the living world. From her home in the UK during lockdown, Lucy Jones endeavors to understand her lifelong, otherworldly experiences in nature.
Unable to find answers in the evangelical Christianity of her upbringing or in the scientific papers and studies that have made up the bulk of her recent research, Lucy arrives at Druidry. As she steps further into this mysterious and ancient tradition, she encounters ways of thinking and being that speak clearly to the essential problems of our time and offer an alternative to a culture of ecological destruction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay, Tristan McConnell ventures into the shrinking mountain forests that surround Mount Kenya, home to medicinal plants, ancient trees, rivers, and rainfall. In the wake of the legacies of colonialism and rampant poverty that have stripped much of the country of its trees, he encounters Kenyan foragers, conservationists, and elders who are working to restore the forests and safeguard its value. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Just as modern science is catching up to the ancient understanding of our deep emotional and physiological relationship to the living world, the twin forces of urbanization and technological advancement are pulling our bodies and our attention away from the elements and rhythms of nature that are so essential to our well-being.
In this narrated essay, naturalist Michael McCarthy explores the ways in which the “anthropause” ushered in by the coronavirus has—on an unprecedented scale—made nature visible again, even as the world’s growing cities increasingly sever humanity from the living world. “Perhaps the most significant way of all in which nature has come back to us during the pandemic,” he says, “is that people turned to it themselves.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. While the free market system we embrace in the United States touts individualism and defines value by monetary worth, a gift economy functions through an ethic of reciprocity and interconnection. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies of exchange? “Thriving is possible,” she writes, “only if you have nurtured strong relations with your community.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this in-depth interview, Reverend angel Kyodo williams reflects on our widespread crisis of story, the failure of institutional religions to offer a new way forward, and her philosophy of Radical Dharma—a path to individual and collective liberation. This interview was originally published in 2019 as part of our Faith Issue.
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As a chemical plant in St. James Parish, Louisiana, threatens a majority Black community with toxic emissions, Boyce Upholt looks deeply at the nature of air and considers how it can challenge the often white ideal of the wild as a place of escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay, poet Jake Skeets enters into the memories he shares through touch and, in doing so, conjures a deep reverence for the spaces we remember. From a stubbled chin and stucco wall to bloody knees and tadpoles, the memories he shares are held in the physicality of the body. It is through what he calls “radical remembering,” which carries us across the time and space of existence, that he unfolds these “memory fields” through language and storytelling and offers this Diné perspective of time, memory, and land. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rowen White is a Seedkeeper from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and an activist for Indigenous seed sovereignty. In this in-depth interview originally published in our Food Issue, Rowen shares what seeds—her greatest teachers—have shown her: that resilience is rooted in diversity and that seeds carry the potential for the restoration of the living systems that nourish us. Seeds, she says, reflect back to us encoded memories of how to nurture a food system that is rooted in a culture of belonging. As we gather safely around the table this coming week, we invite you to consider our relationship to the foods that nourish us and to reflect on the encoded memories of planting and care that you carry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay, CMarie Fuhrman encounters a coyote whose leg is caught in a trap in the southern Montana prairie. As she decides what to do, she navigates the two legacies of her identity—Native and white. In doing so, she considers what it means to be trapped and what it means to be free. CMarie is the author of “Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems” and co-editor of “Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Conversation, and Craft.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay, ecological historian Bathsheba Demuth travels across the easternmost edge of northern Russia—home to the Native Chukchi people and their herds of reindeer. As she uncovers the history of this landscape, she encounters the allure of the apocalyptic arc—the promise of a new world—and the rise and ruin of the Soviet ideology that sought to impose its utopian vision on the Chukchi, their reindeer, and the natural cycles of the Russian tundra. Through the Soviet project’s ambition to “tame” the tundra and turn the living world into an economic resource, we are confronted with uneasy parallels to capitalist society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this interview, Sandor Katz discusses his new book, Fermentation as Metaphor. A world-renowned expert in fermented foods, Sandor considers the liberating experience offered through engagement with microbial communities. He shares that the simple act of fermentation can give rise to deeply intimate moments of connection through the magic of invisible forces that transform our foods and our lives, generation by generation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
From the Yangtze Valley, to Neolithic Mesopotamia, to the orchards of Oxford, Roger Deakin sought to understand the origins of the domesticated apple. His essay East of Eden—an excerpted chapter from his book Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees—recounts his journey into the wild fruit forests that grow on the mountainsides of Kazakhstan. After Roger’s death in 2006, Robert MacFarlane planted a sapling grown from an apple seed that Roger carried home. As ‘Roger’s tree’ now fruits in his yard, Robert collects the pips to distribute to others, envisioning a “worldwide wildwood of memory-trees.” This essay is narrated by Robert Macfarlane. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Gathering wild foods was once a practice of deep observation, carried out by women who knew the ways of wild medicine. In this narrated essay, Gina Rae La Cerva considers the widespread loss of this traditional knowledge and the generations of women in her family who have intimately known the land. How, she asks, can the ancient feminine understanding of wildness and foraging serve a fragmented world? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The coronavirus has shrunk the scale of our individual worlds, setting us on an uncertain and increasingly narrow path. While in lockdown, David Farrier finds inspiration in the meandering imprints left by the tracks of animals. He begins to seek out desire paths: ways of walking and paying attention that mimic the way an animal pads a path across the land. Walking through his neighborhood, he locates new ways of moving which offer new opportunities for noticing both where we are and where we wish to be. When we keep ourselves open to the unexpected, he suggests, we might find a new path from here to there, and from present to future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
To conclude our six-part “Language Keepers” podcast series, we explore the rapid rate of language loss occurring around the world and hear from speakers of endangered languages who are increasingly resisting predictions of extinction. We revisit the keepers of the Tolowa Dee-ni’, Karuk, Wukchumni, and Kawaiisu languages, who offer their thoughts, prayers, and hopes for the future of their languages and for the generations that will come after them.
Adapted from our award-winning multimedia story, “Language Keepers,” this six-part podcast series explores the struggle for Indigenous language survival in California. In each episode, we meet and learn from dedicated families and communities across the state who are working to revitalize their Native languages and cultures in order to pass them on to the next generation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
For many Indigenous communities, the effort to document and learn from as many last speakers as possible is a race against time. In Episode Five of our “Language Keepers” podcast series we meet Julie Girado Turner, who, for nearly two decades, has been documenting and recording her father and aunt, the last remaining fluent speakers of the Kawaiisu language.
Adapted from our award-winning multimedia story, “Language Keepers,” this six-part podcast series explores the struggle for Indigenous language survival in California. In each episode, we meet and learn from dedicated families and communities across the state who are working to revitalize their Native languages and cultures in order to pass them on to the next generation.
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Episode Four of our “Language Keepers” podcast series brings us to the home of Marie Wilcox—the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language and the creator of the only Wukchumni dictionary. Younger generations of language learners often rely on both fluent elders and physical resources: Marie and the dictionary she created have been an inspiration to four generations of her family and to Indigenous communities around the world.
Adapted from our award-winning multimedia story, “Language Keepers,” this six-part podcast series explores the struggle for Indigenous language survival in California. In each episode, we meet and learn from dedicated families and communities across the state who are working to revitalize their Native languages and cultures in order to pass them on to the next generation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Episode Three of our “Language Keepers” podcast series explores efforts to revitalize the Karuk language, which is deeply tied to the Klamath River in Northern California. Just as a river is dependent on an unobstructed flow to remain healthy, a language depends on healthy connections and transmissions between generations of speakers. Karuk language keepers Maymi Preston-Donahue, Phil Albers, and Julian Lang are working to fill generational gaps in the transmission of Karuk.
Adapted from our award-winning multimedia story, “Language Keepers,” this six-part podcast series explores the struggle for Indigenous language survival in California. In each episode, we meet and learn from dedicated families and communities across the state who are working to revitalize their Native languages and cultures in order to pass them on to the next generation.
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Episode Two of our “Language Keepers” podcast series brings you to the redwood forests of Northern California, home to Loren Bommelyn, the sole remaining fluent speaker of the Tolowa Dee-ni’ language. Tolowa, like other Indigenous languages, is interwoven with the ecosystem where it came into being and thus holds the traditional ecological knowledge of the Tolowa people. Along with many Native communities, the Bommelyn family is grappling with what is at stake—for their children, for their culture, and for the land itself—if they lose their language.
Adapted from our award-winning multimedia story, “Language Keepers,” this six-part podcast series explores the struggle for Indigenous language survival in California. In each episode, we meet and learn from dedicated families and communities across the state who are working to revitalize their Native languages and cultures in order to pass them on to the next generation.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adapted from our award-winning multimedia story, “Language Keepers,” this six-part podcast series explores the struggle for Indigenous language survival in California. Two centuries ago, as many as ninety languages and three hundred dialects were spoken in California; today, only half of these languages remain. In this series, we delve into the current state of four Indigenous languages which are among the most vulnerable in the world: Tolowa Dee-ni’, Karuk, Wukchumni, and Kawaiisu. Along this journey, we meet and learn from dedicated families and communities across the state who are working to revitalize their Native languages and cultures in order to pass them on to the next generation.
In Episode One, we are introduced to the language revitalization efforts of these four Indigenous communities. Through their experiences, we examine the colonizing histories that brought Indigenous languages to the brink of disappearance and the struggle for Indigenous cultural survival in America today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lia Purpura is the author of nine collections of essays, poems, and translations, including It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful and All the Fierce Tethers. In this narrated essay, Lia bears witness to the decomposing body of a deer and considers stories of “rightness”: the processes which transform bodies from one state to another and the beginnings that emerge from endings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Daisy Hildyard examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn our attention toward the space between things. She notes that these “negative spaces” reveal relationships that normally lie beyond our perception. The intertwinement of our lives—human, plant, animal—has become more apparent: our lives trace through other beings, and their lives trace through our own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We commissioned four authors to approach the theme of apocalypse through fiction, from the perspectives of past, present, and future. Our fourth and final installment is a short story by Ben Okri, entitled And Peace Shall Return. Ben is a Nigerian poet, novelist, and playwright whose many books and poetry collections include Prayer for the Living, Rise Like Lions: Poetry for the Many, and The Famished Road. Narrated by the British actor Colin Salmon, And Peace Shall Return is set twenty thousand years into the future, when an exploration of the Earth uncovers the final notes and unfinished stories left behind by the last sentient human beings in the twilight of their history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We commissioned four authors to approach the theme of apocalypse through fiction, from the perspectives of past, present, and future. Our third installment, The Basilisk, is from Paul Kingsnorth, a writer and poet living in rural Ireland. Paul is the author of the novels The Wake and Beast, the essay collection Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, and his latest book of nonfiction, Savage Gods. Narrated by Paul, The Basilisk is an exchange of letters between an uncle and a niece. In it, Paul imagines how two members of a family might respond to our addiction to technology as they divulge their thoughts about the otherworld, possession, and fatal temptation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this interview, cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram discusses the animism, power, and potency of the living world. In our current moment of ecological and societal instability—rich with possibility and fraught with potential danger—he calls on us to remember the animacy of our own bodily senses and our inherent participation in the collective, embodied flesh of the Earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We commissioned four authors to approach the theme of apocalypse through fiction, from the perspectives of past, present, and future. Our second installment, Ink, is a story by Sjón, an Icelandic poet and writer. He is the author of The Blue Fox, From The Mouth Of The Whale, and Moonstone—The Boy Who Never Was. In this short story—narrated by Sjón—we are introduced to Valur Sveinsson, a Chargé d’Affaires in London. Born with the gift of second sight, Valur encounters supernatural beings called the Inkborn and witnesses their telling of an apocalyptic vision of the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As part of our planned Apocalypse issue, we had commissioned four authors to approach this theme through fiction from the perspectives of past, present and future.
Our first installment in our fiction series, entitled Thylacine, is from the American novelist Lydia Millet, author of numerous books including A Children’s Bible; Love in Infant Monkeys, a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize; and My Happy Life, winner of the 2003 PEN Center USA Award for Fiction. This short story, narrated by Lydia, explores historical endings as a man seeks the company and friendship of the last Tasmanian tiger housed in a failing zoo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As the existence of the famed ivory-billed woodpecker is increasingly left to the realm of myth, Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder explores the widespread disappearance of birds in the narratives of apocalyptic prophecy that run through our collective consciousness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Crystal Wilkinson is the author of The Birds of Opulence; Water Street; and Blackberries, Blackberries, and an Associate Professor of English in the Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Kentucky. At a time that is punctuated by the loss of breath—when we are increasingly gripped by the profound understanding that the right to breathe is the right to life—this essay from Crystal contemplates the intimacy of breathing as she considers how we live, die, and love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As part of our recent series of online conversations with our contributors, mythologist and storyteller Dr. Martin Shaw joined us to read from his new book, Courting the Wild Twin and talk about his recent op-eds for the magazine on the mythical response to the pandemic. In the moderated discussion that followed with Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, Martin answered questions from the audience and shared his thoughts on initiation, agency, and the move into the mythical. Our task now, he said, is to look at the prayer rug of our own lives as the mythic ground that we each stand upon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay, poet Jake Skeets explores apocalypse, time, and futurity from a Diné perspective. While colonial frames foretell a final apocalypse that will arrive in linear time, Indigenous people have experienced many beginnings and many endings. As he observes the grief that has arisen in his community during the coronavirus pandemic, he considers how hope might be reimagined. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay, Roy Scranton asks what we mean when we say “the world is ending.” Examining the nature of the narratives we tell ourselves about the future, he explores what revelation may be before us. Roy Scranton is the author of I Heart Oklahoma!; Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature; We’re Doomed. Now What?; War Porn; and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Amaud Jamaul Johnson is the author of Darktown Follies, Red Summer, and Imperial Liquor. In this essay, Amaud explores the loneliness and fear that arise in the wake of inexplicable tragedy where personal losses highlight histories of suffering and the deep uncertainties of our time. This fact has always been true, but feels more so in the midst of a pandemic, massive job losses, food insecurity, climate chaos, and the national uprisings provoked by ongoing racial injustice and police brutality in the US. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
During the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, Kalyanee Mam’s mother nourished and sustained her family with umami soups, chicken rice, and fried noodles. Years later, as Kalyanee cooks for her husband and mother-in-law who have fallen ill during the pandemic, she reflects on food as a conduit for healing and love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As sirens fill the streets of London, George Prochnik recalls a revolutionary poet’s account of the 1832 cholera pandemic that unfolded in Paris. While watching history repeat itself in devastating refrain, George wonders: What is hysteria? What is necessary passion and courage? How can we respond both lucidly and compassionately as this disaster progresses? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Since lockdowns began, there has been an unprecedented reduction in human-created noise. Our movements have lessened, the circle of our existence is closer, we are more still. As the din of human activity has quieted down, the sounds of the living world have come to the forefront. Around the world people have reported hearing an increase in the songs of birds, the chirping of insects, and the myriad sounds of non-human life. A newfound silence is pervading many of our environments as cars, planes, and industries have increasingly been brought to a standstill.
A couple of years ago, we spent a few days filming a virtual reality project in Olympic National Park’s Hoh Rain Forest with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton. Gordon has traveled the globe documenting the impacts of noise pollution on the natural world. His work has revealed that silence (which he describes as the absence of human generated noise) is on the verge of extinction and that even the most remote corners of the world are impacted by the noises of modern life. The virtual reality piece we created, Sanctuaries of Silence, shares Gordon’s story and takes you on an immersive listening journey into the Hoh, one of the largest temperate rain forests in the United States. Pacific tree frogs, Roosevelt elk, northern spotted owls, and pacific wrens are among the many creatures who call the forest home. It’s far from main roads and development, making the Hoh one of the quietest places in North America. In response to the pandemic, we’ve adapted Sanctuaries of Silence into a podcast that we hope might help us to reconnect with silence at this particular time and listen for the value and wisdom that is present within it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As part of our recent series of online offerings, the Emergence Magazine Book Club spent the month of April reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s celebrated, best-selling book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. For the Book Club’s last meeting, Robin joined us in a vibrant live video zoom conversation, hosted by acclaimed writer Robert Macfarlane. Responding to questions asked by readers from around the globe, Robin discussed dandelions as global citizens, the role of the writer as a conduit for story, and the spirit of reciprocity that lies at the heart of our relationship to place. It was just a conversation that was too rich not to be shared on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Self-quarantined and isolated in her apartment in Brooklyn, Hala Alyan is more aware than ever of humanity’s interdependence—suddenly exposed as a raw, pulsing nerve. With all of us inescapably together as we move through this pandemic, how, she asks, can we make room for grief, empathy, and hope? Hala is an award-winning Palestinian American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in numerous journals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the wake of COVID-19, Lisa Lee Herrick challenges the resurgence of dangerous historical frames of race and belonging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Facing the paradoxes and ambiguities enmeshed with the COVID-19 pandemic, David Abram finds beauty in the midst of shuddering terror. As we’re isolated in this uncertain time, he writes, we can turn to the more-than-human world to empower our empathy for each other.
Read the essay on our site: https://emergencemagazine.org/story/our-unknowing/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Paul Elie is the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Reinventing Bach and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. As part of our celebration of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day we invited Paul Elie to trace the literary history of the environmental movement from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment. Though the plight of the Earth has become a fixture of collective consciousness, he asks if we will live up to the promise of unified action on behalf of the Earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this extended meditation on the relationship between place and intimacy, the body and the word, Carl Phillips walks among trees to explore what can and cannot be known. Carl is the author of numerous books including Wild Is the Wind, Reconnaisance, Riding Westward, and The Rest of Love.
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The poet W.S. Merwin spent the last four decades of his life on Maui, restoring a plot of abandoned land that would become one of the most diverse and expansive palm tree gardens in the world. In this essay, staff writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder visits these lush nineteen acres, now home to more than 3,000 palm trees and more than 400 unique species. Merwin wrote poetry in the morning and spent his afternoons planting and tending to trees. His poems are living witness to the care he offered to this land.
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-poet-and-the-palm-tree/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this interview, science writer David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, speaks about the root causes underlying the current pandemic and explores the ways in which viruses are embedded in the same systems of ecology and evolutionary biology that we are. As we disrupt wild ecosystems and shake these viruses free, COVID-19 offers an opportunity to reimagine our relationship with the natural world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
After visiting a two-thousand-year-old Linden tree in England, William Bryant Logan explores the nearly forgotten practice of coppicing, or cutting back a tree to stimulate growth, and discovers a symbiotic relationship between humans and trees. William is the author of Sprout Lands, Oak, Air, and Dirt. He is a certified arborist and serves on the faculty of the New York Botanical Garden.
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/woods-work/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
When a marble mine began to strip a village of its forests, the people of Piplantri, India, developed a tree-planting project that reclaims a vital and ancient relationship between trees and women.
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In this narrated essay, ecologist Lauren E. Oakes looks beyond the scientific lens of subject-object while studying the consequences of climate change on a dying community of yellow cedars in the Alaskan archipelago. Lauren is the author of In Search of the Canary Tree.
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/on-survival-the-dead-the-sapling-and-the-ancients/
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Nearly all of Ethiopia’s original trees have disappeared, but small pockets of old-growth forest still surround Ethiopia’s churches, living arks of biodiversity amongst the brown grazing fields. In this essay, Fred Bahnson travels to Ethiopia to gain a deeper understanding of how our fate is tied with the fate of trees. Fred teaches at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, where he directs the Food, Health, and Ecological Well-Being Program and the author of Soil and Sacrament.
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Nick Hunt visits Białowieża, Europe’s largest surviving primeval forest, where life and death transform into one another with vigorous entanglement. Here, he traces the history of the European forest, revealing an ongoing battle between light and shadow, clearing and woods. Nick is a writer, journalist, and the author of Where the Wild Winds Are and Walking the Woods and the Water.
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In this essay, Amaud Jamaul Johnson returns to his poem “The Maple Remains” for the centennial anniversary of the Red Summer of 1919. Through historical witnessing we see the deep ties between racial and arboreal scars. Amaud is an award-winning poet and the author of Darktown Follies and Red Summer.
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/felling-light/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this multi-sensory essay, David George Haskell invites us into the unique, and sometimes surprising, aromas of eleven different species of trees. David is author of The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors and The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature. https://emergencemagazine.org/story/eleven-ways/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this extensive interview, Richard Powers discusses his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory and his intention to tell a story in which humans are not separate from the living world around them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Andri Snær Magnason is an Icelandic writer and documentary filmmaker. In this interview, Andri discusses his new book On Time and Water and our relationship to time in an age of ecological crisis. With Iceland having lost its first large glacier, the Ok glacier, this past summer—Andri discusses the ways in which geological time is beginning to move at the speed of human time. In order to bring about a planetary paradigm shift, he says, we need new ways to see and imagine ourselves into the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this vibrant conversation, poet and author Forrest Gander interviews Richard Powers about his acclaimed new novel The Overstory. Recorded during a live event co-presented by Emergence Magazine and Point Reyes Books, the two Pulitzer Prize-winning authors reflect on continuity, kinship, and proximity with the living world. Advocating a radical reimagining of the novel that moves away from the centering of human characters, Powers speaks of a new ethic that includes an understanding that there is no separate thing called us and no other separate thing called wilderness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rowen White is a Seed Keeper from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and an activist for seed sovereignty. In this in-depth interview, Rowen shares what seeds—her greatest teachers—have shown her: that resilience is rooted in diversity, and that all of us carry encoded memories of how to plant and care for seeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay from our first issue on Perspective, medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen examines the history of our attraction to see Earth from above. He wonders what an enlarged perspective might bring. Does it offer a deeper understanding of ourselves as Earthlings or is this attraction an indulgence in a dangerous fantasy that we might be free of the gravity, and complexity, of life on Earth. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is the author of Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman and Earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
From her own backyard compost pile in Oregon to the dark earths of the Amazon and Liberia, Emma Marris explores the possibility that there is more to our ancient kinship with soil than nutrient extraction. Emma is the author of Rambunctious Garden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol farmer and food justice activist. This profile explores her work to create spaces for people of color to heal and reconnect to the land—an effort to end America’s food apartheid system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Raised on her grandmother’s jam cake, biscuits, and sweet black tea, Crystal Wilkinson evokes a legacy of joy, love, and plenty in the culinary traditions of Black Appalachia. Crystal is the author of The Birds of Opulence, Water Street, and Blackberries, Blackberries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Marveling at worms, fungi, and the pioneering water bear, Jay Griffiths brings our attention to what dwells beneath our feet, inviting us to remember that soil is what turns the Earth’s barren rock into the riotous life we know. Jay is the author of Anarchipelago, Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, Wild: an Elemental Journey, and A Love Letter from a Stray Moon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the storied universe of Hmong cosmology, Squirrel is revered for its ability to outsmart the hunter. In this narrated essay, Lisa Lee Herrick recalls her grandfather—a master squirrel hunter—bringing home a squirrel for spicy hunter’s stew, and how this dish helped unravel a hidden past. Lisa is an award-winning writer, artist, community organizer, and media specialist who helped produce the film, The Hmong and The Secret War, now available online at PBS.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this in-depth interview, David Zilber, director of the fermentation lab at Noma—named the best restaurant in the world—discusses how food is culture, but fermentation is culture on a deeper level. David has worked at Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark, since 2014 and is the co-author of The Noma Guide to Fermentation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this in-depth interview, writer Robert Macfarlane takes listeners on a journey through language and landscape, exploring how a precision of utterance and a grammar of reciprocity can summon wonder in our encounters with place. Robert is the author of “The Old Ways,” “The Wild Places,” “Mountains of the Mind,” “Landmarks,” and “Underland.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Paul Kingsnorth faces his suspicion that modern written language is in fact a tool of ecocide. Paul is the author of the novels “The Wake” and “Beast,” the essay collection “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,” and the poetry collection “Songs from the Blue River.” His latest book is “Savage Gods: A Crisis of Words.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Elizabeth Rush reflects on climate change as a transformational force on our landscapes and the words we might use to grasp this shifting reality. Her book “Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore” was recently nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for its rigorous reporting on America’s vulnerability to rising seas. This narrated essay is an account of the days she spent driving through the Pacific Northwest while on a tour for the book—a time of wildfires, loss, and possible futures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David Haskell enters the intricate and generative soundscape of the world of birds, inviting us to join in a practice of cross-species listening as a bridge to kinship. David is the author of “The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors” and “The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In an effort to seek out a language beyond the human, Charles Foster travels to the Isle of Skye to listen to the intricate vocalizations of the eight remaining Scottish killer whales. Charles is the author of more than twenty books, including “Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide” and “Wired for God: The Biology of Spiritual Experience.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rejecting the refrain “there are no words,” author and poet Camille T. Dungy reaches for a language that can encompass the experience of loneliness, erasure, and loss. Camille is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently “Trophic Cascade,” and a collection of personal essays, “Guidebook to Relative Strangers.” She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As a companion to Kimberly Ruffin's essay “Bodies of Evidence” from our Faith issue, she created this guided practice offering ways to connect to the living world through a walk in the forest. For Kimberly, faith is a continuous exchange of belonging, an experience that’s palpable among trees. In this practice, as with any experience in nature use common sense, trust your intuition, and tell somewhere where you’re going. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
For Chickasaw novelist and poet, Linda Hogan, hope lives where faith has fallen away. During an encounter with caged elephants, she experiences a wave of profound and startling love in the presence of beings so very different from—and so very like—ourselves. In her essay “Ancient Root,” Linda reflects on how these beings embody a terrestrial intelligence akin to our own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay, Aylie Baker reflects on her experiences sailing by canoe under Micronesian Master Navigator Sesario Sewralur and shows how we can draw on an innate ability to orient ourselves in a shifting world. Born in Maine, Aylie is committed to supporting the healing of watershed communities. View this story on our website: www.emergencemagazine.org/story/wave-patterns Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In an age when the fate of the world is frightfully unknown, George Prochnik, author of “In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise,” makes a case for uncertainty as a form of faith and hope. If we unravel our desire for the all-knowing, he says, we can enter into a sanctuary of mystery, in which “I do not know” becomes a statement of hope. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this in-depth interview, Reverend angel Kyodo williams reflects on our widespread crisis of story, the failure of institutional religions to offer a new way forward, and her philosophy of Radical Dharma—a path to individual and collective liberation. A Sensei in the Japanese Zen tradition, angel is author of “Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace” and coauthor of “Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As Kimberly Ruffin revisits her upbringing and spiritual heritage, she compiles the bodies of evidence that have invigorated her spirit. A certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide and a new member of a church, Kimberly explores where “spirit power” can be found, both within a church community and in the places where faith rises up within the land. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this in-depth interview, Bill Porter, famously known as the translator Red Pine, reflects on his encounters with Chinese hermits and his long history with the great Taoist and Buddhist poets of China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Struggling to explain her belief in God to her atheist husband, award-winning Palestinian American poet Hala Alyan reflects on her Muslim faith as inextricably linked to her family, to Palestine, and to histories of erasure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Struck by the thought that the Catholic Church and the natural world have traded places as sources of transcendence, Paul Elie wonders how religion and the natural world might come together for shared renewal. Paul is the author of the award-winning book, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay, writer and poet Lia Purpura delves into the horrified wonder and holiness of death, exploring burial practices that are intended to nourish the earth, as it has nourished us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The roots of religious belief and the sacredness of nature were once closely entwined: the ancient yew grows in the churchyard; the forest monks of Thailand follow the Buddha’s example of meditating beneath trees. Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder profiles theologian Martin Palmer and his work to engage faith-based communities in recovering narratives of love and care for local ecologies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In a world where the cosmologies of black women are continually erased and excluded from knowledge traditions, Kinitra Brooks seeks connection with her late great-grandmother, Mama Myrt, who first introduced her to rootworking traditions and inspired her life’s work. Kinitra’s essay, "Myrtle’s Medicine," reflects on the meaning and beauty of embodied ways of knowing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the summer of 1968, Christian mystic Thomas Merton undertook a pilgrimage to the American West. Fifty years later, writer Fred Bahnson set out to follow Merton’s path, retracing the monk’s journey across the landscape. This narrated essay offers an intimate meditation on Merton’s life and the relevance of the spiritual journey today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David Abram is a cultural ecologist and philosopher. In this essay, he reflects on our undying urge to recreate a primal experience of intimacy with the surrounding world, offering notes on technology and animism in an age of ecological wipeout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this interview, writer Paul Kingsnorth discusses some of the central themes explored in his work. The conversation centers on the "myth of progress," the failure of technology to deliver the "good life," and how both have led us into the environmental crisis. He describes how old myths offer a way to be with the uncertainty embedded in our time, and how we can listen for new stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Paul Kingsnorth is a writer living in rural Ireland. Recalling a visit from a dark figure in a dream, who reappeared in his novel "The Wake," Paul reflects on writing as an alchemical process, one involving transformation, discipline, and purification. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this in-depth investigative story, Emergence Magazine staff writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder explores the collision of values unfolding on the summit of Mauna Kea, the proposed site for what would be the largest telescope in the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a writer, scientist, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is author of the acclaimed book "Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants." In this essay, Robin reflects on the ancient technology embedded in our relationship with maize, recalling that a grinding stone, an irrigation system, and an ear of corn are also technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bayo Akomolafe is a writer and lecturer from western Nigeria. In the age of the Anthropocene and entrenched politics of whiteness, this essay brings us face-to-face with our own unresolved ancestry, as it becomes more and more apparent that we are completely entwined with each other and the natural world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nick Hunt is a writer, journalist, storyteller, and self-described wind-walker. His latest book, "Where the Wild Winds Are," tells the story of four European winds and their effects on the landscape, people, and culture. In this essay Nick continues this exploration, focusing on the mythological understanding of winds as gods, experiencing their power firsthand as cause for awe, exhilaration, and fear. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This past August we had a chance to sit down and talk with Martin about the intelligence that lies at the heart of myths. The best stories, he says, ought to be trailed not trapped, and approached with discernment, an open heart, and an attuned ear. He began our conversation by telling the story of the Lindworm, an old Norwegian tale about a mythical creature that is part human and part snake. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this essay Kara visits a primordial, old-growth forest in Poland. Here she meets a herd of bison, encounters loggers and felled trees, tracks wolves, and observes how a healthy forest is in a constant cycle of death and rebirth. Upon returning to her home in the sheep-grazed moors of Wales, she asks how this example of regeneration can be healing, not just for the desolated Welsh landscape she wants to re-wild, but for herself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Craig Childs writes about adventure, wilderness, and science. His books include "Atlas of a Lost World," "Apocalyptic Planet," "Finders Keepers," and "The Animal Dialogues." In this essay Craig takes a solo canoe trip down the Green River, paddling through Canyonlands in southeast Utah, reflecting on what it means to be alone in the wild. Encountering risk, isolation, and joy, and entering into conversation with the land and waters around him, Craig explores what happens when we choose to be in solitude. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this essay Camille reflects on the journey of seeds, how much of what we plant in our gardens was brought to our soils during the slave trade, and the legacy of trauma and triumph that lies within our food. Planting food, she contends, even in contaminated soils, becomes both an acknowledgment of grief and a celebration of the beauty of growing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this narrated essay, cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram questions the deep intelligence that lies at the heart of crane, butterfly, and salmon migration patterns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Beginning with W. B. Yeats's iconic poem, "The Second Coming," acclaimed writer Paul Kingsnorth narrates his essay "A Storm Blown from Paradise," an inquiry into linear and cyclical time and the sweeping momentum of progress. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode, Emergence Magazine staff writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder travels to the Great Plains of Nebraska and South Dakota, to speak with people who are restoring the native prairie and learning what it means to listen to the land. From an ancient inland sea, to the Homesteading Act of 1862, to the modern realities of industrial agriculture, Wild Fire, Flat Water explores the long history, and ongoing story, of this land. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this interview, Buddhist eco-philosopher Joanna Macy discusses her personal journey into the worlds of anti-nuclear activism, Buddhism, and deep ecology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices