Emergence Magazine Podcast

The Scaffolding of Life: Cyclical Structures of a Forest — A Conversation with Suzanne Simard

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 04:00:00 -0700

How can we put our emerging knowledge around forest systems into practice? In this episode, renowned forest ecologist Suzanne Simard returns to the podcast to talk about her latest book, When the Forest Breathes, and her decades-long Mother Tree Project, which integrates Western science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge to reshape our forest harvesting methods in ways that protect the integrity of both their ecosystems and our climate futures. As she shares her team’s landmark findings on what Mother Trees are telling us about generational resilience, Suzanne challenges us to begin working with the intelligence of the forest.

Read the transcript.

Photo by Bill Heath

Song of the Seasons: A Meditation on Cycles, Story, and Humility – by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 04:00:00 -0700

This special episode features the audio edition of our new pocket book, Song of the Seasons, by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, which offers a meditation on how the sacred nature of the seasons reveals itself to us in every moment and asks us to respond from a place of gratitude and humility. Like the book, this audio version is meant to be listened to outside, amid the Earth's cycles of birth, growth, decay, and death, accompanying you as you seek a deeper engagement with the seasons.

Discover the print edition of Song of the Seasons.

Artwork by Maurits Wouters.

Wildflower Beauty and the Search for Home – by David George Haskell

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 04:00:00 -0700

This week, biologist David George Haskell brings us into the tangled histories and biological rhythms of four wildflowers that grow around his home in Atlanta, Georgia, revealing how each is rooted within webs of innovative, reciprocal relationships between hummingbirds, puddles, bee tongues, and human hands. Tracing how these heralds of spring have adapted to new climate conditions and new neighbors, he invites us to seek the stories of the flowers where we live to ground ourselves in the shifting realities shaping us too.

Read the essay.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Hear more from David on the seasons and wildflowers in his conversation with Dara McAnulty and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee.

Image caption: Aquilegia coerulea

Making Light: An Invitation… – by Kerri ní Dochartaigh

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:00:00 -0700

This week, Irish author Kerri ní Dochartaigh offers an evocation on how we might hold the duality of lightness and darkness in a world increasingly divided. When fear and loss are pervasive, how do we engage with the life that remains? Can we see experiences of grief as invitations into feeling our relationality with all living things? Tracing how a childhood in Derry in the northwest of Ireland taught her to tend the delicate, often invisible threads that bind us to each other, she brings us into the Celtic celebration of Bealtaine, which marks the transition towards the brightness of summer, to reveal how Earth’s cycles of light and dark are a dance of which we are a part.

Read the essay.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Photo by Al Brydon and J.M Golding

A Thousand Ways to Live Within the Seasons — A Conversation with David G. Haskell, Dara McAnulty, and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:00:00 -0700

In this second episode of our seasons conversation series, Volume 6 contributors David G. Haskell and Dara McAnulty explore how our senses shape myriad experiences of the seasons, some collective and some deeply personal. Finding wonder in the symbolism of daffodils in spring, carnivals of pollen-dusted black bees, and the feeling of joy tinged with grief as familiar seasonal moments return each year altered, David and Dara invite us to open our eyes, ears, and hearts to the celebration that lives within the seasons.

Read the transcript.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Summer Light: A Failed Essay in Four Parts – Jake Skeets

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:00:00 -0700

This week, Diné poet Jake Skeets brings us into the rising dust, big sky, and bent light of summers on the Navajo Nation, and explores how the body is not separate from the seasons, rather one of the many terrains upon which they play out. Now living amid excessive heat warnings, sandstorms, and wildfire haze that test his love of the summer, Jake asks how such extremes will reshape our intimate and ancestral relationship with the seasons.

Read the essay.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Image Credit: Evelyn Dragan / Connected Archives

On the Road with Thomas Merton – Fred Bahnson

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 04:00:00 -0700

For Christian mystic Thomas Merton, the sacred and the profane were continuous: all was alive with divine presence. Stands of redwoods were his cathedral, the sky, birds, and wind were his prayers, and the silence of the forest his lover. This week, we return to an essay by Fred Bahnson, who follows Merton’s 1968 pilgrimage to the American West as he travels to Redwoods Monastery and Christ in the Desert Monastery. Guided by Merton’s contemplation and seeking the same solitude, Fred discovers anew the ways God runs through both land and heart.

Read the essay.

Watch the companion film by Jeremy Seifert.

Photo by Thomas Merton.

The Springing Time – Melanie Challenger

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 04:00:00 -0700

Can we learn from more-than-human beings how to bring our bodies into a more direct conversation with the seasons? In this week’s story, bioethics and history researcher Melanie Challenger explores how our culture insulates us from experiencing seasonal signals in the natural world, ultimately impeding our ability to respond to ecological change. Examining how animals and plants translate important shifts in the land into meaningful activity, Melanie reflects on what it would take for humans to reawaken the same attunement to the changes, great and small, unfolding around us.

Read the essay.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Photo credit: Credit: Alex Strohl / Verb Photo

Echoic Memory – CMarie Fuhrman

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 04:00:00 -0700

This week, author and poet CMarie Fuhrman listens to the forest speak its old stories through the roll of thunder, the river emptied of salmon, and the howl of wolves in Idaho’s remote Frank Church Wilderness. In these sounds and silences, she remembers the people and knowledge that colonial history has tried to erase. Recognizing herself as a “person of ground,” she contemplates the past as something that we can call forth into the present, and memory as moving in the opposite direction of prayer—down into the Earth.

Read the story.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Photo by Luca Werner

A Hollow Bone – Terry Tempest Williams

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 04:00:00 -0700

In a season of loss, how does absence offer a greater understanding of presence? This week, Terry Tempest Williams brings us into her love affair with Utah’s Great Salt Lake, a place that nourishes twelve million migrating birds, bison herds, and deep-rooted human communities, and which is now in retreat. Contemplating how we might be in service to this dying lake, Terry summons us to be present with the losses in the landscape.

Read the story.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Photo by Christina Seely

Tortoise Station – Lydia Millet

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 04:00:00 -0700

Depicting a distant age in which river guardians, mothmen, and condor trackers strive to protect a dying world, novelist Lydia Millet asks whether we can navigate species loss not through visions of saviors, but through patient devotion to what might yet emerge through care. Amid extreme temperatures and invasive insects, this short story follows a team of caretakers who track, feed, and hatch the clutches of “the old ones”—ancient desert tortoises nearing extinction.

Read the story.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Credit: Daniel Farò / Connected Archives

Memory of Winter – Zoë Schlanger

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 04:00:00 -0700

For plants, the moment of spring emergence is the gamble of their lives, says journalist Zoë Schlanger. They rely on a convergence of genetic instructions from within and environmental cues from without to know when it is time to bring new life into the world. But what happens when seasonal markers and a plant’s molecular memory, shaped by generations of winters, no longer agree? Seeing this increasing tension between timelines reflected in her own journey toward parenthood, Zoë asks how we can steward a world where the fragile conversations between biological clocks are being rewritten.

Read the essay.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Photo by Sam Laughlin.

Theia – Brian Isett

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0700

In this week’s story, biologist Brian Isett ponders the age-old question his young daughter will inevitably ask — Where did the Moon come from? — and uncovers how the Earth got Her seasonal song. He introduces us to Theia, the proto-planet that came crashing into the surface of our infant planet four and a half billion years ago, tilting the Earth on Her axis and birthing the Moon. This meeting ultimately shaped the passing of time, the movement of tides, and the cycle of the seasons as we have known them. With the seasons now changing in response to our neglect of the Earth, Theia offers a reminder that these rhythms have always evolved through relationship.

Read the essay.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Image: Earth’s reflection on the Moon / NASA.

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The Heart of Requiem – A Conversation with Susan Murphy Roshi, Terry Tempest Williams, and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0700

Sharing a depth of attention for what stands to be lost in our relationship with the seasons, Volume 6 contributors Terry Tempest Williams and Susan Murphy Roshi come together to explore the theme of requiem in this first conversation of a companion series to Seasons. Drawing on their respective essays, “A Hollow Bone” and “Alive In the Skin of a River’s Flow,” Terry and Susan contemplate what becomes present amid absence, a love for the burning world, and ways we can move with flock consciousness through this time of ecological uncertainty.

Read the transcript.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

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Learning to Listen to Plants – A Conversation with Monica Gagliano

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0700

How might our understanding of plants transform if it embraced the voices of plants themselves? In this conversation, research scientist Monica Gagliano speaks about her groundbreaking research on plant communication and cognition, informed by knowledge imparted by plants through visions, dreams, and sensations. Sharing stories of how her remarkable experiments have evolved alongside a relationship of reciprocity and trust with the plants she studies, Monica offers a model for how we can radically bridge the rigor of Western scientific methodology with the deeply human and spiritual act of listening to plants.

Read the transcript.

Photo by Andrea Pellerani.

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A River Reborn: Eco-Cultural Revitalization on the Klamath – Ben Goldfarb

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0700

Journalist Ben Goldfarb follows the winding course of the Klamath River, from Oregon’s high desert plateaus to the Pacific Ocean in Northern California, as its four most obstructive dams are dismantled under a restoration plan reopening hundreds of miles of salmon spawning habitat. Ben chronicles how the prolonged absence of salmon has reshaped this waterway, its surrounding redwood forests and canyons, and the Yurok, Karuk, Hoopa, and Shasta tribes for whom this creature is not only sustenance, but sacred kin. Tracing the monumental effort to restore the vital presence of salmon, Ben witnesses how the restitching of relationships between land, fish, and humans is nourishing this ecosystem anew.

Read the essay, featuring a postscript from Ben as he returns to the Klamath

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Photo by Kiliii Yüyan.

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Be Earth Now – Rainer Maria Rilke recited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Earlier this year, the remarkable eco-philosopher Joanna Macy passed away at age ninety-six. Among her many gifts, she was a seminal translator of the great twentieth-century poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In our final episode of the year, we return to a selection of translations of Rilke from The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, by Joanna and award-winning poet Anita Barrows, that speak to the beauty and mystery present in worlds both seen and unseen, the unknowability of the Divine, and the union of nature and the transcendent. We share them this holiday period in the hope they nourish heart and spirit, inviting reflection on all that is given and all that fades away.

Cover artwork by Claire Collette.

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Alive in the Skin of a River’s Flow – Susan Murphy Roshi

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0700

In this week’s story, Australian writer and Zen roshi Susan Murphy explores how haiku’s reflections of the seasons are being disrupted by the climate crisis. How will this poetic form bear witness to the ferocity of change reshaping the seasons? Woven with verses from Bashō, Buson, Issa, and fellow Volume 6 contributor Ron C. Moss, this story contemplates whether haiku may, in fact, be a vessel for holding the paradox of the seasons in this moment: allowing us to both mourn and love a rapidly evolving Earth.

Read the essay.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Image: Asako Narahashi, Kawaguchiko #5, 2003

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The Substrate of Mystery: Mycelial Networks, Mutualism, and Symbiosis – A Conversation with Merlin Sheldrake

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Fungi are veteran survivors of ecological disruption, and they demonstrate a radically different approach to crisis and decision-making than we do. While we tend to work with binaries and control when navigating uncertainty, mycelium works from a place of relationality. In this conversation, acclaimed mycologist and author Merlin Sheldrake explores what we can learn from mycelial networks about building flexible ecological, social, or structural systems that are rooted in mutuality and exchange. Tracing the ways we can embrace a mycelial way of thinking, he invites us to dwell within the “substrate of mystery” embodied by fungi: a liminal space where new ways of being can emerge.

Read the transcript.

Photo by Tomas Munita.

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Practical Reverence – A Conversation with Robin Wall Kimmerer

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0700

This Thanksgiving holiday, we return to a conversation with Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, where she talks about her new book The Serviceberry, which emerged from an essay she wrote for us about the potential of a gift economy to recognize the sacred nature of the Earth. Robin introduces a set of ethical and pragmatic principles, known as “the Honorable Harvest,” that orients us to take only what we need, share abundance, and offer gratitude for what is selflessly given to us; and leads us towards embodying a simple “practical reverence” for the Earth.

Read the transcript.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Photo courtesy of MacArthur Foundation.

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Seasons: A Conversation at the Tate Modern – with Melanie Challenger, Sam Lee, Dara McAnulty, Kerri ní Dochartaigh and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0700

In November, we celebrated the launch of our latest print edition, Seasons, at the Tate Modern in London. Recorded live at the event, this conversation featuring four Volume 6 contributors, delves into each of their stories and the themes of requiem, invitation, and celebration at the heart of their seasonal experiences. From honoring the fragility of spring birdsong, to finding an expanded sense of self through seasonal “noticelings,” this wide-ranging and lively exchange explores the myriad ways of remembering our relationship with the seasons.

Read the transcript.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

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Earth as Koan, Earth as Self – A Conversation with Susan Murphy Roshi

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0700

In this conversation from our archive, Australian writer and Zen roshi Susan Murphy immerses us in the ancient tradition of koan and the power of the “not-knowing mind” to open a treasury of resources for meeting the climate crisis. Sharing several koans from Zen masters that push at the boundaries of our consciousness, she speaks to the way they can draw us deeper into kinship and reminds us that the Earth Herself is a koan waiting to be known.

Read the transcript.

Photo by Warren Summers.

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On Time, Mystery, and Kinship – A Conversation with Jane Hirshfield

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0700

We return to one of our most in-depth interviews this week: a conversation with poet Jane Hirshfield, who has contributed a new poem to our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons. Reciting several poems from her prolific body of work, including Time Thinks of Time, she speaks about how her Zen practice has led her to embrace the largeness of time’s mystery. She shares how this inner “spaciousness,” present in many of her poems, can uncover intimacy with both the ordinary and the divine.

Read the transcript.

Read Jane’s poem “Time Thinks of Time.”

Photo by Curt Richter.

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Strange New World - Roy Scranton

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 11:00:00 -0700

Probing the flatness of his Midwestern landscape, Roy Scranton challenges us to peer beyond what meets the eye to engage more thoughtfully with a place’s ecological, geological, and cosmological dimensions. What first appears to him as farmland, highways, and worn industrial sprawl in his new home of South Bend, Indiana, begins under sustained attention to disclose rich layers of physical and temporal meaning. Roy invites us to practice this same attentiveness, allowing ourselves to be changed by the stories that make a place new and strange, and the mundane alive with resonance.

Read the transcript.

Artwork by Nico Krijno.

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Offering Our Attention with Humility – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 11:00:00 -0700

In this final talk of a three-part series, Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks about two essential elements needed if we are to tend to a relationship of reverence with the Earth: humility and offering. To ground ourselves in respect for the power of the Earth, and respond to Her unconditional generosity, we can begin by remembering to de-center our needs, and instead ask ourselves: What attitude towards the seasons can help me develop a relationship to place? How can I respond with love not only to the wonder, but to the pain of the Earth? When we are rooted in this space of humility and offering, we can remain open and present with Her beauty and loss.

Read the transcript.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Artwork by Thoth Adan

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A Story of Requiem, Invitation, and Celebration – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 11:00:00 -0700

We are in need of stories that can help us navigate the complexity of our moment: both the unfolding ecological catastrophe and the love we feel for our burning world. This second talk in a series given by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee at our Song of the Seasons retreat on Whidbey Island explores how the story of birth, growth, decay, and death told by the seasons, regardless of where one is in the world, invites us into a space of reverence that offers a container for holding love and loss amid the vast ecological changes reshaping our Earth.

Read the transcript.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Artwork by Thoth Adan.

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Unfurling the Spiral – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 11:00:00 -0700

As an introduction to the themes within our latest print volume, Seasons, we’re sharing a series of talks over the next few weeks given by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee at our Song of the Seasons retreat on Whidbey Island. This first talk explores the cyclical nature of the seasons, and how when we devote our attention to these cycles over time, their continuous variation reveals itself, unfurling like a spiral that draws us deeper into kinship with the Earth. If we find the courage to remember ourselves not as impervious to the rhythms of the seasons, but as profoundly connected to them, we can begin to open to their sacred invitation.

Read the transcript.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Artwork by Thoth Adan.

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Thin White Line – Maya Pace

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0700

After the destructive fires of 2020, writer and facilitator Maya Pace awakens to how California’s essential dry, scorched nature has been repressed to realize a vision of economic and social prosperity across the state. Searching for what it means to love a place that is harsh, uncomfortable, or increasingly unfamiliar, she connects with communities living in landscapes removed from our ideals of paradise. What does it mean to live fully in the reality of a place, rather than how we wish it to be? she asks. What if our relationship with the land grew not from a practice of control, but from surrender?

Read the essay.

Photo by Young Suh.

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Making the Invisible Visible – A Conversation with Ersin Han Ersin

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0700

A companion to our Breathing with the Forest feature, this conversation from our 2023 Shifting Landscapes exhibition with Marshmallow Laser Feast director Ersin Han Ersin explores the importance of imagination in making visible the often invisible threads that bind us together with the living world. He talks about the collective’s work creating spaces where people can step into deliberate acts of connection with the more-than-human, and how art can allow us to embody the experiences of other beings by playing with the plasticity of our perception.

Read the transcript.

Explore Breathing with the Forest online experience.

Image courtesy of Marshmallow Laser Feast and Sandra Ciampone.

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Museum of Color – Stephanie Krzywonos

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0700

Nonfiction writer Stephanie Krzywonos opens a door into the histories of our most iconic and desired pigments, from ochre to bone black, lapis lazuli to mummy brown. In our earliest attempts to recreate the magnificent colors of Earth for our art, garments, make-up, and more, we mixed and alchemized matter drawn from the flesh of the Earth Herself. Stephanie follows a spectrum of colors from these origins, through the entangled webs of colonialism, capitalism, and the more-than-human world, to their synthetic replication and mass production, inviting us to see how our colors hold stories of both lightness and darkness.

Read the essay.

Artwork by Studio Airport.

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Thirty Years – Annabel Howard

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0700

What if we had only decades left before the final harvest capable of feeding the world? Accustomed to Earth’s abundance year after year, can we imagine an end to something so eternal? In thirty short passages, from pruning dandelions with her four-year-old to grappling with the mathematical theory of infinity, art historian and writer Annabel Howard moves through a mind-warping process of fathoming a world where the cycles that have sustained us since the beginning of time cease. Following her fascination with the apocalyptic imagery in Botticelli’s Mystical Nativity, she contemplates how imagining the end of the infinite is not radical for our time, but rather an enduring way of giving shape to inconceivable realities. Like all of us, she reaches for certitude amid the fear of a world aflame, only to glimpse the paradox of apocalypse: that in ending there lies beginning.

Read the essay.

Image © Carolyn Drake / Magnum Photos.

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Widening Circles — A Conversation with Joanna Macy

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0700

In honor of the recent passing of the eco-philosopher, Buddhist scholar, and dear friend Joanna Macy, we return to our interview with her from 2018. In this conversation, she traces the ways a life-long heart connection with the living world cultivated a resounding ecological awareness within her work and spirituality; and explores how we might return to an “ecological self” as a way to be of service amid the climate catastrophe. Joanna was also a seminal translator of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, finding his contemplations on the entwinement of grief, beauty, and spiritual life deeply resonant. You can hear Joanna recite, alongside Anita Burrows, a selection of their translations in our audio story Be Earth Now.

Read the interview transcript.

Photo by Adam Loften.

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Being with the Dark — an Emergence Magazine Practice

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 11:00:00 -0700

We’re living in a world that is perpetually bathed in artificial light. We repel the dark. Yet, we live in the midst of what is often referred to as “dark times.” How can gazing upon the night sky connect us to a greater sense of space, beauty, and possibility? Are we able to come into a relationship with something infinitely bigger than ourselves? How can we be present and engaged amid the realities of environmental crisis, inequality, and shifting political tides? Whether you live in the city or someplace where the outdoors is more accessible, this final episode in our summer of practice audio series invites you to immerse yourself in nightfall and welcome the night as a window into mystery and awe.

Explore the online version of this practice.

Illustrations by Aldo Jarillo.

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Listening for Silence — an Emergence Magazine Practice

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 11:00:00 -0700

What does it mean to listen without judgement, allowing your ears to be present, open, and curious? Inspired by our virtual reality film Sanctuaries of Silence, which follows acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton as he documents the sounds of the Hoh Rain Forest in western Washington State, this practice invites you to discover how a new experience of sound and silence can profoundly impact your relationship to place. By taking in sounds with equal value and becoming aware of the presence and absence of noise, voices, and quiet, the simple act of listening can help us come to know a landscape through the senses, rooting us in the power of sound and silence.

Explore the online version of this practice.

Illustration by Aldo Jarillo.

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Listening to the Language of Birds — A Practice by David G. Haskell

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 11:00:00 -0700

Biologist David G. Haskell calls the practice of listening to other species the original “augmented reality.” In opening our minds to the language of the species around us, we can experience connection and meaning that far transcends anything offered by an electronic substitute. This week, we’re sharing the next instalment in our Summer of Practice podcast series with a practice David wrote for us that invites you to attune to the birdcall near your home; become aware of the ecological rhythms and connections around and within you; and step into a sense of belonging as the conversations of humans and birds intertwine.

Explore the online version of this practice.

Illustration by Aldo Jarillo.

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Encountering Trees — an Emergence Magazine Practice

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 11:00:00 -0700

We continue our summer of practice with a second series of audio practices throughout August. In this episode, you are encouraged to respond to the ways trees invite you—through bloom, shade, wonder, breath—into closer relationship. From the old-growth forests whose presence precedes our lifetimes to the rooted sentinels of our own backyards, trees are humans’ oldest and most constant companions. This practice calls you to bring a renewed quality of attention to the threads that bind you and trees together within a shared biosphere.

Explore the online version of this practice.

Illustration by Aldo Jarillo.

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Ledgers in the Land — an Emergence Magazine Practice

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 11:00:00 -0700

In this episode, we bring you the final Time audio practice—the fourth in a series exploring how we can come to dwell within a kind of time that is in relationship with the Earth, rather than the clock. This invitation draws your attention to the Earth’s immense capacity for recording the passage of time. Imagine your way backwards through millennia and then forward into the far future, as your journey through your homeplace, attentive to the histories held within its topography, ecosystems, and human markings.

Explore the online version of this practice or shop our practice booklet, A Practice in Time.

Illustration by Aldo Jarillo.

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Meeting Kairos — an Emergence Magazine Practice

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 11:00:00 -0700

In Ancient Greek mythology, the old and powerful god Chronos oversaw the linear progression of time. Kairos, the youthful, wing-footed god of opportunity, expressed the possibility within a given moment. This practice—the third in our summer audio series—orients you towards “kairos time”: openings in time in the wake of change; timing that moment itself dictates. Explore how your sense of time determines how you participate in the world, and how you might balance a reliance on structured time with an openness to the unpredictable.

Explore the online version of this practice or shop our practice booklet, A Practice in Time.

Illustration by Aldo Jarillo.

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Walking Out of Time — an Emergence Magazine Practice

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 11:00:00 -0700

This summer, we’re sharing a series of audio practices—each inviting you into an experience of Earth time. This episode orients you towards one of the simplest practices you can do to shift your sense of time: walking. Follow the metronomic rhythm of your feet—down a bustling street or through a secluded woodland—and learn how moving at your most natural pace allows you to form relationships with what surrounds you. Receptive to the present moment, open to a simultaneous experience of deep inwardness and profound outer attentiveness, and step into the expanse of the timeless.

Explore the online version of this practice or shop our practice booklet, A Practice in Time.

Illustration by Aldo Jarillo.

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Kinship Time — an Emergence Magazine Practice

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 11:00:00 -0700

What happens when we’re able to inhabit time—even if momentarily—in an entirely new way? And how could this shift the way we relate and engage with each other, with the presence of mystery, and of course, with the Earth? Over the summer we're featuring a special series of audio practices exploring Time. This first episode invites you to attune to how your body and those of nearby more-than-human beings are in conversation with your ecosystem via internal clocks. Creating time together with the Earth, you are attentive to the pulses within and around you, and time can become an experience of kinship.

Explore the online version of this practice or shop our practice booklet, A Practice in Time.

Illustration by Aldo Jarillo.

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Becoming Earth: An Experimental Theology – Robin Wall Kimmerer

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 11:00:00 -0700

Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer visits the Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon, where over the course of two centuries scientists will study how old-growth trees and their decomposition contribute to the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth. For the forest’s cedar trees, Robin says, death is merely a transition—a rearrangement of elements from one species to the next. What might this teach us about the nature of our own “afterlife?” Can this cyclical ecology be an experimental theology? This episode is the final in a series we are sharing in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature.

Read the essay.

Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath.

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Is Paddy Heneghan Dead? – Liam Heneghan

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 11:00:00 -0700

In this third story we’re sharing in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature, ecosystem ecologist Liam Heneghan turns to a council of philosophers and physicists to help reconcile the human experience of growth with the reality of decay as he keeps vigil by his father’s bedside. He contemplates how closely life sits at the margins of death—one bleeding into the other—and wonders what can be learned from the everyday breakdown of leaves, milk, friendships, solar systems that might orient us to the nature of our own passage from life to death. As his father passes—elements dispersing into air and soil—Liam recognizes that all that flourishes must return to Earth; that in decay, something always endures.

Read the essay.

Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath.

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Fire in the Belly — Tyson Yunkaporta

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 11:00:00 -0700

The second in a series of stories we’re sharing in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature, this narrated essay by Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta explores the ways we’ve long mistaken cerebral thinking for knowing, and in doing so, dulled a more vital intelligence. He argues that we are “overthinking and underfeeling” our existence, and reminds us that we have a second brain: the gut, which “governs terrestrial relations and is in constant communication with land and all our human and nonhuman kin.” Likening our intellect to lightning, Tyson shares how we must let it interact with the regenerative and relational “fire” of our bellies if we are to respond properly to the needs of land and cosmos.

Read the essay.

Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath.

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Supracellular: A Meditation – Sophie Strand

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 11:00:00 -0700

Over the next month we'll be sharing four stories in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature. In this first one, author Sophie Strand uses her imagination to feel herself as part of the more-than-human world—as river, hummingbird, and mycelial network. Opening herself up to a “supracellular” state, she practices letting her mind leak beyond the bounds of individual consciousness and through the threads of relation that she shares with her ecosystem to experience being not a siloed self, but a web of interconnectivity. What empathy might take root and grow, she asks, when we practice thinking like this—when we imagine our consciousness to extend far beyond the confines of our own bodies?

Read the essay.

Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath.

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Sun House – A Conversation with David James Duncan

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 11:00:00 -0700

What does it mean to search for transcendence in a world going completely out of balance? From our archive, this interview with acclaimed author David James Duncan explores his epic novel Sun House, which follows an eclectic collection of characters as they each seek Truth and meaning, together forming an unintentional community in rural Montana. Talking about the ways a heart can be transformed by deep experiences of mystical transcendence, David shares the impetus behind the novel: to impart an experiential model of contemplative inner life that could help us navigate our ecological unraveling. He also speaks about the mystics, from Zen master Dōgen to the thirteenth-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, and what futures might become possible if we open our consciousness to love and the Divine.

Read the transcript.

Photo by Chris La Tray.

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The Ethics of Listening to Whales – A Conversation with James Bridle, Rebecca Giggs, César Rodríguez-Garavito, and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 27 May 2025 11:00:00 -0700

What if we listened to the complex clicks of whales and could understand their meanings? What would we hear and how might we respond? More-Than-Human (MOTH) Life Collective founder César Rodríguez-Garavito, artist and technologist James Bridle, and author Rebecca Giggs come together in this conversation with Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee to explore the ethical, legal, and relational implications of a new project using AI machine learning to translate the speech of sperm whales. Contemplating the human-centric linking of language with intelligence, the moral complexities of collecting and using these translations, and what it might mean to have an ear for “whale-ish,” they discuss whether a shared language is even needed to find a depth of kinship with whales.

Read the transcript.

Image: Mike Korostelev / Moment via Getty Images

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Is a River Alive? – A Conversation with Robert Macfarlane

Tue, 20 May 2025 11:00:00 -0700

In this conversation, acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane asks the ancient and urgent question: is a river alive? Understanding rivers to be presences, not resources, he immerses us in the ways they “irrigate our bodies, thoughts, songs, and stories,” and how we might recognize this within our imagination and ethics. He speaks about his latest book, and traces his journeys down the Río Los Cedros in Ecuador, the waterways of Chennai in India, and the Mutehekau Shipu in Nitassinan and how each brought him to experience these water bodies as willful, spirited, and sacred beings.

Read the transcript.

Photo by William Waterworth.

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A Small King – Nicholas Triolo

Tue, 13 May 2025 11:00:00 -0700

Writer Nicholas Triolo walks the length of the Rio Côa in central Portugal with a book by Christian mystic Thomas Merton in his pack. For Merton, the living world shimmered with a divine feminine presence, meaning all within it was worthy of our love. Along the winding landscape of the Côa, damaged by agriculture and home to endangered animals, Nicholas witnesses the messy, subversive nature of “rewilding.” And with Merton as his companion on the journey, he begins to feel a wild, relational divinity in the land around him, and a devotion essential to rewilding place and self amid today’s crises of despair and destruction.

Read the essay.

Photo by Ricardo Ferreira / Courtesy of Rewilding Portugal.

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In the Wake of the Sandbound – Nick Hunt

Tue, 06 May 2025 11:00:00 -0700

Nick Hunt traverses the spine of the Curonian Spit in the Baltic Sea, and learns how its sands—anchored by forest roots for millennia—began to move rapidly and swallow villages in the eighteenth century when woodlands and sacred groves were systematically clear-cut for timber. Though halted through engineering and reforestation, the dunes are now eroding under human footsteps, and spilling into the lagoon they border. As he witnesses how quickly landscapes are changed by our own hands, Nick asks if the challenge is not in reversing the damage we’ve done, but in remembering humility before the forces of the Earth.

Read the essay.
Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

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The Aquarium – Daisy Hildyard read by Colin Salmon

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 11:00:00 -0700

English novelist Daisy Hildyard envisions the deep time evolution of the coastline of Scarborough, North Yorkshire: from a prehistoric meteor strike, to a 19th-century seaside aquarium devoid of fish, a present-day spate of dead tides, and a future where part of the human population has evolved into a hybrid marine species, drawn back to the cradle of the sea to care for its degraded waters. Vividly narrated by acclaimed British actor Colin Salmon, and created as part of Wild Eye—an art and nature trail in Yorkshire that raises awareness about coastal erosion in the face of climate change—this short story traces the forever-shifting tides of our relationship with the sea.

Read the story.

Illustration by Muhammad Fatchurofi.

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A Special Celebration of the Earth’s Sounds and Songs

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 11:00:00 -0700

In celebration of Earth Day, this episode invites you to offer your ears to the polyphony of sounds and silences that give the planet Her voice with two of our most cherished audio stories. “When the Earth Started to Sing,” by biologist David G. Haskell, combines human speech with more-than-human voices to immerse your senses in the connective power of sound across deep time. “Sanctuaries of Silence,” an adaptation of our virtual reality experience featuring acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, brings you to the Hoh Rain Forest—one of the quietest places in North America—and guides you through the sounds that emerge in the absence of noise.

Illustration by Daniel Liévano.

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The Fault of Time – Erica Berry

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 11:00:00 -0700

As humans, we long for stability, yet the Earth tells us in many languages—erosion, ice melt, the seasons—that all is fleeting in an endless cycle of creation and destruction. Grappling with her fear of change caused by wildfires in Montana and the long-overdue Cascadia earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, Erica Berry confronts how the colonial erasure of Indigenous stories of place and her own limited sense of time have blinded her to the Earth’s dramatic flux. As she learns that impermanence doesn’t always signal loss, but rather the transformation of form, she finds a way to hold the fluctuation of the lands she loves.

Read the essay.

Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

Photo by Zeb Andrews.

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Telling the Bees – Emily Polk

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 11:00:00 -0700

In the tradition of telling the bees, beekeepers relay the news of a death in the family to each of their hives, oftentimes draping them in black mourning cloth. As bee colonies in the US perish in record numbers, Emily Polk wonders if bees not only witness human grief, but also feel loss themselves. Meeting with a famous Yemeni beekeeper in downtown Oakland, California, and scientists from around the world studying bee behavior and cognition, she learns of the enduring generosity and spirit of survival of these tiny creatures, and glimpses the greater circles of loss that connect us with the more-than-human world.

Read the essay.

Photo: Wray Sinclair / Gallery Stock

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Song of the Cedars – A Conversation with Giuliana Furci, Robert Macfarlane, César Rodríguez-Garavito, and Cosmo Sheldrake

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 11:00:00 -0700

On a field trip to Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador in 2022, mycologist Giuliana Furci, author Robert Macfarlane, legal scholar and More Than Human (MOTH) Life Collective founder César Rodríguez-Garavito, and musician Cosmo Sheldrake wrote and recorded “Song of the Cedars”—a composition made not just in the forest, but in conscious collaboration with it. Rich with field recordings of the ecosystem and the track’s entwined human and more-than-human melodies, this conversation between the foursome explores their ongoing effort to gain legal recognition of Los Cedros as co-creator of the song, which if successful, will be a world first.

Read the transcript.

Photo by Robert Macfarlane.

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The Time Traveler’s Wife’s Husband – Tyson Yunkaporta

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

In this experiential essay, Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta breaks the constructs of linear time and storytelling with love magic—a connective substance that transcends time and space—and explores how we might slip between the cracks of the linear and maintain connection across time. Drawing on the knowledge encoded in a traditional boomerang he carved from silky oak, Tyson urges us to flow with love magic; to “swim in its currents” to offset the greed and extraction that is consuming the world.

Read the essay.

Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

Artwork by Kai Udema.

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Another Kind of Time – A Conversation with Jenny Odell

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

From the archive, this week’s episode is a conversation with author and artist Jenny Odell. Speaking about her book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, she challenges the social and cultural ideas that underpin standardized, mechanized time, and imagines how we might instead attune to the rhythms of the Earth and embrace interruptions that allow us to glimpse the inherent unpredictability and creativity of every moment. What choices, what futures, might become possible, she asks, if we stepped out of chronos time and towards a kairos time?

Read the transcript.

Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

Photo by Chani Bockwinkel.

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Coming Home to the Cove: A Story of Family, Memory, and Stolen Land – Episode 4

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

What does a place, a community, look like when it welcomes home Indigenous presence? Recorded in January 2025, this new fourth episode of “Coming Home to the Cove” explores the impact of Theresa Harlan’s work to protect, restore, and rematriate Felix Cove over the last three years—from widening community awareness of Coast Miwok history; to opening hearts to allyship between Indigenous and settler families; and running traditional ecological knowledge workshops. Amid ongoing vandalism of her ancestral home, rancher evictions, and new land management, Theresa continues to fight for a larger vision of healing, and asks, are we willing to come together to honor the entire story of a land?

Photo courtesy of Hewitt Visuals.

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Coming Home to the Cove: A Story of Family, Memory, and Stolen Land – Episode 3

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

This audio 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. Episode Three examines the role Spanish missions, boarding schools, and ranching empires played in driving many Coast Miwok people from their ancestral lands; and follows Theresa Harlan and her relatives on a boat trip to Felix Cove to experience their mothers’ perspective of arriving at their home from the water. Next episode, we’ll be sharing a new fourth installment to the series, tracing the impact of Theresa’s vision to restore and protect Felix Cove over the last three years, and the ongoing challenges of creating space for Indigenous history.

Originally released on February 8, 2022.

Photo by Jocelyn Knight.

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Coming Home to the Cove: A Story of Family, Memory, and Stolen Land – Episode 2

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

This series tells 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. Episode Two traces the Coast Miwok’s ten-plus-millennia-long presence in this landscape. Rich with interviews with a local historian and members of Theresa Harlan’s family, this episode asks: How is it that ten thousand years of continuous human civilization is seemingly invisible today? And who gets to define history?

Originally released on February 1, 2022.

Photo courtesy of Theresa Harlan.

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Coming Home to the Cove: A Story of Family, Memory, and Stolen Land – Episode 1

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

This series tells the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their ancestral home in Northern California, and one woman’s grassroots mission to restore their living history to the land. As we reshare this series over the coming weeks, we’re adding a new fourth episode tracing recent developments in Theresa Harlan’s work, its impact on the community, and the ongoing challenge of creating space for Indigenous history. In Episode One, Theresa Harlan shares the story of her family's uprooting from Tomales Bay, which ended their time there but did not sever their connection to the ancestral lands and waters of Tamal-liwa.

Originally released on January 25, 2022.

Photo courtesy of Theresa Harlan.

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Deep Time Diligence – A Conversation with Tyson Yunkaporta

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

In this interview from the archive, Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta invites us into an Indigenous understanding of time as inseparable from place. He shares the ways Lore and knowledge are kept within lands and tribes over centuries, and how deep time thinking can help us feel our obligation to beings, landscapes, and future generations. With candor and humor, Tyson emphasizes the importance of story, data, and technology emerging from a place of “right relationship” if we are to usher in new systems of order amid the chaos of the current moment.

Read the transcript.

Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

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Finding the Mother Tree – A Conversation with Suzanne Simard

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

In this archive conversation, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard speaks about her life’s work exploring tree intelligence and relationships, and her most recent research on Mother Trees—the oldest trees in the forest—and their astounding ability to recognize and nourish their own kin. Stepping outside of scientific precepts towards a vernacular that acknowledges connection—“mother,” “children,” “grandfather”—she delves further into the intricate web of relationships that Western systems of knowledge are only beginning to understand, and wonders what lessons these trees can teach us about healing our separation from the Earth.

Read the transcript.

Photo by Diana Markosian.

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Wild Clocks – David Farrier

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

David Farrier examines how “wild clocks”—the biological and ecological rhythms that living beings use to coordinate their lives with the greater cycles of the Earth—are falling out of synch with each other in our age of ecological crisis. Traversing the Future Library in Norway, Sami reindeer herds in Scandinavia, and oyster colonies in Scotland’s Firth of Forth, David considers the different ways time is made between people, more-than-human beings, and place—and wonders if the disordering of our wild clocks offers an opportunity to understand anew how time can be an expression of kinship.

Read the essay.

Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath.

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The Radical Intimacy of Spiritual Ecology – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 08:00:00 -0700

Given at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London in November 2024, this final talk in a series by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee explores how an embodied practice of spiritual ecology is a radical act amid a culture that has forgotten the sacred nature of our relationship with the Earth. He shares how a remembrance of this intimate connection is the spiritual responsibility of our time, and that when our hearts recognize and hold this reality, we can keep alive an essential connection and offer a practice of love to the suffering Earth.

Read the transcript.

Photo by Fee-Gloria Grönemeyer / Connected Archives.

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A Path Older Than Memory – A Conversation with Paul Salopek

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

This week, we return to our interview with journalist Paul Salopek, who, for the last decade, has been on an epic journey retracing the migration pathway of some of the earliest humans out of Africa’s Rift Valley. Moving through the world as our ancestors did, Paul shares how he’s become attuned to the way time passes through us and around us: from the ancient pulse of the Earth underfoot, to the fury of mechanized time that rampages through our urban centers. Throughout, he shares profound experiences of timelessness, which he dubs “sacramental time,” that bring together mind, body, and landscape in conversation.

Read the transcript.

Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

Photo by Paul Salopek, National Geographic.

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An Ecological Technology – A Conversation with James Bridle

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

In this expansive conversation from our archive, writer, artist, and technologist James Bridle looks at how the glorification of our own intelligence has shaped the history of technology, and anticipates in our future an “ecological turn” in the way we view and create it. James draws on principles of decentralized knowledge systems, a redistribution of agency among all beings, and an embrace of what is unknowable to envision how our technology could move away from the reductionism of ones and zeros and towards reflecting other kinds of intelligence and the ways we are intimately connected to the world.

Read the transcript.

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The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance – Robin Wall Kimmerer

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

In this episode, we return to one of our most cherished stories: “The Serviceberry,” by Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer. Exploring how we can move away from an economy of scarcity to one rooted in relationship and gratitude, she draws our attention to the gift economies flourishing all around us to affirm that it is entirely within our power to create webs of interdependence outside the market economy. When we find the courage to honor the gifts given by the living world, the outcome, she says, is not only material, but spiritual.

Read the essay.

Read the transcript for “Practical Reverence,” our interview with Robin on her latest book, which was inspired by this essay.

Artwork by Studio Airport.

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When the Prince of Heaven Sleeps – Roger Reeves

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

In a countermelody to the media’s persistent portrayal of Black bodies as working tirelessly, in constant motion, poet Roger Reeves centers images of Black men in postures of rest and repose. Evoking Muhammad Ali slumbering in a four-poster bed, John Coltrane washing dishes within the four walls of his house, DMX watering orchids, and Mike Tyson caring for his flock of pigeons, Roger reflects on the stillness and silence of their interior worlds as a protest against the control of capitalistic time.

Read the essay.

Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

Photo by Gordon Parks.

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Breath-Space and Seed-Time – David Hinton

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

In this narrated essay and six-poem sequence, acclaimed translator and poet David Hinton finds an uncannily literal translation of modern science’s “space-time” in yü chou—one of ancient China’s most foundational cosmological concepts. He invites us to contemplate the fabric of time and space as a kind of primordial breath, drawing on the ideograms for yü chou to show that time is not a metaphysical river moving past, but an all-encompassing present that renders the Cosmos alive. An epilogue of poems delivers us into an elemental world where time is woven with the sacred.

Read the essay and poems.

Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

Artwork by Studio Airport.

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The World Is a Prism, Not a Window – A Conversation with Zoë Schlanger

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

In this episode, climate journalist Zoë Schlanger speaks about her book The Light Eaters and explores what it might mean if we embraced plant intelligence within the frame of Western science. She shares a smorgasbord of new findings around the capabilities of plants—from roots that can sense the sound of running water to flowers memorizing the timing of pollinators’ visits—and wonders how a growing awareness of more-than-human intelligence can upend the structures and hierarchies we have placed around living beings, ourselves included. Talking about the politics of language in the field of botany, shedding her own plant blindness, and how we can widen our scientific imaginations to perceive intelligence in beings without brains, Zoë probes what it will take for us to let plants into the realm of our ethical consideration.

Read the transcript.

Photo by Yael Malka.

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Practical Reverence – A Conversation with Robin Wall Kimmerer

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

In this conversation, Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer celebrates the serviceberry—both as a plant of joyous generosity, and as a living model for a gift economy that recognizes the sacred nature of the Earth. Delving into her latest book, which elaborates on an essay she wrote for us in 2020, Robin speaks about how a sense of “enoughness” can radically shift our habits of consumption; and how the ethical and pragmatic principles of the Honorable Harvest can invite us to honor a currency of relationship over a currency of money, helping us embody a practical reverence for the Earth and Her abundance.

Read the transcript.

Read Robin’s essay from 2020, “The Serviceberry.”

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Dendrochronology – Robert Moor

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

In this narrated essay, writer Robert Moor journeys to Haida Gwaii, an island chain in British Columbia, for the anniversary of a historic agreement between the Haida Nation and the Canadian government that protects the landscape’s last remaining old-growth forests after decades of logging. As he walks through forest stewarded for generations by Haida, Robert begins to see the tangle of Sitka spruces and cedars, mosses and lichens, not as a site of slow decay, but of ongoing growth. How can being in the presence of ancient trees, he asks, help us feel, rather than intellectualize, not only the deep past, but also our responsibility to the future?

Read the essay.

Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

Artwork by Maurits Wouters.

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Wrinkled Time: The Persistence of Past Worlds on Earth – Marcia Bjornerud

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

The Earth has a story that far precedes ours. Before we arrived on the scene, the Earth was already ancient beyond belief, shaped and reshaped by tectonic upheavals, climate changes, and mass extinctions—an evolution She has meticulously archived in the strata and sediment beneath our feet. In this narrated essay, author and geologist Marcia Bjornerud orients us to read these many-volume memoirs of our planet. Celebrating the deep time-fulness of Earth—the four billion years of dynamism that have made this moment possible—she wonders what might happen to our understanding of the past and the present if we remembered the stories that came before our humancentric one.

Read the essay.

Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

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Unborn and Undying – Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Our inner and outer worlds, while constantly changing, feed into each other, mirror each other, and both carry an imprint of what is eternal. In this narrated essay, author and Sufi mystic Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee shows us how the sacred dimension of time, where the linear is absent, can lead us inwards to silence and emptiness; and outwards, towards a pure sensory awareness of the sights, sounds, and rhythms of the Earth. Sharing that time and timelessness “are not separate but part of a living structure that includes a mayfly that lives for a day and a thousand-year-old sequoia,” Llewellyn calls us to regain a relationship with time beyond numbers and schedules; to remember that time belongs to the deeper patterns of life.

Read the essay.

Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

Artwork by Laura Dutton.

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On Time, Mystery, and Kinship – A Conversation with Jane Hirshfield

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Jane Hirshfield’s poetry is both mystical and deeply rooted in physical life, opening our eyes and hearts to what lies at the periphery—what is both ordinary and invisible amid the clamor of modern life—and reorienting us to engage from a space of wonder. In this expansive conversation, Jane recites several of her poems, including "Time Thinks of Time," from our fifth print edition. Drawing on a lifelong relationship with Zen, she speaks about how a profoundly felt intimacy between self and world can recalibrate our ethics, helping us find both humility and an inner spaciousness that can lead us towards being in service to the Earth.

Read the transcript.

Read Jane’s poem "Time Thinks of Time."

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Remembering Earth Time – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0700

This third and final talk from a series by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee weaves together ideas from the previous two, exploring how time and place, love and kinship, the cycles and rhythms of creation, all flow in concert as an expression of the Earth. Offering a way to understand Earth Time through the principles and practices of spiritual ecology, Emmanuel speaks to how we might let go of mechanized time by connecting our inner and outer senses with the cycles that live and spin around and within us. When we reorient ourselves to be in relationship with the essential rhythms of life, we can come to know time as an animate, alive, and sacred expression of the love that runs through all things.

Read the transcript

Find out more about our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

Credit: Photo by Alecio Ferrari / Connected Archives.

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Time and Place – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Through the concept of “space-time” we can understand how the movement of time is fused with physical space into a continuum. But what are the nuances of this relationship, in which time imprints place with meaning, and vice versa? This week’s podcast is the second of three talks given at our Remembering Earth Time retreat earlier this year in Devon, England. Picking up the thread laid out in the previous talk on working with the love that runs through time, Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks about how the intimate relationship between time and place, expressed through the cycles ever-present in our landscapes, can help us form ties of kinship with the Earth. When time becomes rooted rather than abstract, he says, we can once again find ourselves a participant in the mystery and magic of creation.

Read the transcript.

Find out more about our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

Photo by Carl Ander / Connected Archives.

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The Axis of All Things – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0700

In this first talk in a series that brings together many of the themes explored in our latest print edition, Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee offers a way to re-attune our sense of time to be in relationship with the cycles of the Earth—from the deep time movement of mountains, to the fleeting bloom and decay of cherry blossom. While we have stripped time down to a single expression, forgetting the axis of love that runs through it, Emmanuel talks about how inner cycles of breath and heartbeat can return us to a more expansive story of time in which spirit and matter are once again braided together.

Read the transcript.

Find out more about our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

Photo by Dennis Eichmann / Connected Archives.

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ស្គាល់ មជាតិ Knowing Your Taste – Kalyanee Mam

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Released this week, the final film in our Shifting Landscapes documentary film series, Taste of the Land, tells the story of Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam’s search for a spiritual relationship with her homeland. In this companion essay by Kalyanee, she delves deeper into her experiences of cheate—the Khmer word for “taste”—and how she came to understand that to truly know the essence of the land, one must know its taste. Tracing her life back to its very beginnings, she shares her first “land-taste”—the sweet flavor of Battambang oranges—and the many tastes that came after that slowly deepened the yearning in her heart to truly know the soils, waters, mountains, people, and plants of Cambodia. As she reflects on the spiritual fallout of her family’s severed relationship with their homeland, she also contemplates the essential connection that was kept alive through stories, language, and food shared by her parents.

Read the essay

Watch the feature film Taste of the Land, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the fourth in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series.

Photo by Jeremy Seifert.

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Beings Seen and Unseen – A Conversation with Amitav Ghosh

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0700

In his book The Nutmeg’s Curse, scholar Amitav Ghosh writes, “the planet will never come alive for you unless your songs and stories give life to all the beings seen and unseen that inhabit a living Earth,”—seeding a shift in consciousness begins with the stories we tell. In this wide-ranging interview from our archives, Amitav explores the themes of his recent work, including the insidious philosophy that the Earth is inert and how this belief paved the way for the implementation of violent projects around the globe, such as the genocide of Indigenous people and the monolith of capitalism. Unpacking the rise and legacy of an ideology of mastery, Amitav asks, if such conquests were made possible by the narrative of an inanimate Earth, what stories can now be imagined to help us recognize the world as sacred and alive?

Read the transcript

Photo by Sumit Dayal.

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Thylacine – Lydia Millet

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0700

How can we learn to be with the grief that arises within as we witness the destruction being wrought upon the Earth? When we are broken open by the pain of loss, how can we hold and work with the seeds of despair, but also love, that flood into that space? This week, we revisit “Thylacine,” a short story by American novelist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet that imagines the twilight of the last remaining Tasmanian tiger, a creature caught in the crosshairs of Australia’s violent colonization. As a man mourns the death of his mother, he seeks the company of the tiger housed in a failing zoo. Turning to face the loss that begins to swell through the zoo like a plague, he summons the courage to care for what remains amid an overwhelming sorrow for what will inevitably disappear.

Read the story

Find “Thylacine” and other Short Stories of Apocalypse, in our inaugural print fiction collection.

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Documenting Shifting Landscapes – A Conversation with Kalyanee Mam

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0700

In December last year, Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam’s short film Lost World screened at our Shifting Landscapes exhibition in London. Kalyanee’s films tenderly document the changing cultural and ecological landscapes of her homeland, and in Lost World she shares the story of a community in Koh Sralau whose livelihoods are threatened as the mangrove forests they depend on are ruthlessly mined for sand to build an “eco-park” in Singapore. In this conversation, recorded live at the exhibition, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks with Kalyanee about her years-long process of creating the film, and the intimate relationships she holds with people and land that allow her to tell powerful, and often heartbreaking, stories of changing landscapes from a place of humility and connection.

Read the transcript

Watch Kalyanee’s short film Lost World and read her companion essay

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Memory, Praise, and Spirit – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0700

This talk was a keynote given by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee during a conference on spiritual ecology and peace building at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in July. It explores how spiritual ecology is fundamentally a memory of living in kinship with the Earth that must be reawakened if we are to embody a spiritual connection with the living world. Turning to praise and prayer, and the many forms they take, as ways to return to this sacred relationship, Emmanuel calls us to sweep the dust of our forgetfulness and hold the Earth in our hearts with love

Read the transcript.

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Giantstone – Andri Snær Magnason

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

This short story, written by Andri Snær Magnason for our third print edition, follows an architect in Reykjavík grappling with the growing discord between his creativity and a capitalist reality. Laying bare the ways narratives of control and human supremacy can manifest in the physical objects we make, “Giantstone” asks us to consider what new stories could begin to shape our inner and outer worlds. Will we remain stuck in our humancentric philosophies, or will our art come to reflect a way of life that keeps and cares for the Earth?

Read the short story.

Watch the film The Last Ice Age, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the third in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series.

Illustration by Juan Bernabeu.

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On Time and Water – A Conversation with Andri Snær Magnason

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

The warming of the planet is ushering in changes on a mythological scale. Oceans heat up, ice shelves melt, great floods swallow landscapes, ancient forests are reduced to ash. In this interview from our archive, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason speaks about how such incomprehensible changes are accelerating geological timescales. Instead of playing out over millennia, vast transformations of the Earth are now happening in the span of a lifetime, and in rapid succession. An accompaniment to The Last Ice Age—the third film in our Shifting Landscapes film series—this conversation with Andri explores how we can shift our sense of time to comprehend an uncertain future with greater clarity. Drawing on poetry, memories, stories from his grandparents, and language that infuses meaning into the data-led narrative of the climate crisis, Andri turns to the power of mythology to help us comprehend both the loss and possibility of our moment.

Read the transcript.

Watch the film The Last Ice Age, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the third in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series.

Photo by Gassi Olafsson.

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ChatGPT: A Partner in Unknowing – Dana Karout

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

ChatGPT has divided opinion on how artificial intelligence might shape our future: Is it a harbinger of our demise? Or a friend, arrived just in time to guide us through our collective unraveling? As we entangle ourselves with this technology, are there ways we can use it to transform our intelligence, rather than simply replicating it?

In this week’s essay, writer and adaptive leadership trainer Dana Karout pokes fun at the ways ChatGPT mirrors our own limited ways of thinking. Drawing on her work helping communities navigate conflict and complexity, she pushes us to resist regurgitating what we already know in situations that demand new ways of being. As we try to address the existential challenges mounting around the world—ecological, social, spiritual—could ChatGPT’s empty spiels help us let go of our certainties? What true creativity, what real responses to our moment of crisis, might emerge from our unknowing?

Read the essay.

Illustration by Vartika Sharma.

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Born was the Mountain – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Last week we released Aloha ‘Āina, the second film in our Shifting Landscapes documentary film series, which tells the story of how acclaimed Native Hawaiian poet Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio brought her poetry and love of the land to the forefront of the movement to protect the sacred Mauna Kea from the construction of a thirty-meter telescope.

To complement the film, we’re returning to an investigative story we published several years ago when moves to begin construction first ignited protest at the foot of the mountain. Written by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, this story—rich with the voices and chants of Mauna Kea land protectors—traces the collision of values that continues to play out on the mountain, giving a depth of context to the promise of guardianship maintained by the Kanaka Maoli community.

Read the transcript.

Watch the film Aloha ‘Āina, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the first in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series.

Photo by Kapulei Flores.

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Sun House – A Conversation with David James Duncan

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Although the ecological sphere has long declared the need for a shift in consciousness if we are to survive the myriad crises we’ve ignited, this conversation often lacks examples of what this change in consciousness might be like as a lived, embodied experience.

This week, author of the cult classics The Brothers K and The River Why, David James Duncan, joins the podcast to speak about his new epic novel, Sun House—a story following the journeys of an eclectic collection of characters, each seeking Truth and meaning, who come together to form an unintentional community in rural Montana. David talks about the impetus behind the novel to impart an experiential model of contemplative inner life that might help navigate a future of social, cultural, and ecological unraveling that looms large. Wide-ranging and tender, the conversation explores how the wisdom of the great mystics—from Zen master Dōgen to the thirteenth-century Christian theologian Meister Eckhart and the Beguines—can be relevant in uncovering responses to the crises we face.

Read the transcript.

Photo by Chris La Tray.

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The Nightingale's Song – A Conversation with Sam Lee

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0700

This month we released the first film in our new four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series exploring the role of art and the storyteller in our age of ecological crisis. The inspiration for The Nightingales Song, which spends time with British folk singer Sam Lee during nightingale season as he joins the bird in mutual song, grew from a special interview we held with Sam in 2021.

To accompany the film, we’re returning to this conversation with Sam, where he shares the story of how the call of the nightingale opened him to a kinship with the more-than-human. Reflecting on how this bird has served as a “wisdom keeper” and “unlocker” of hearts for generations of poets, musicians, and storytellers, he also speaks more about his process of leading audiences into this magical space of communion with the nightingale each spring.

Read the transcript.

Watch the film The Nightingale's Song, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the first in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series.

Photo by Dominick Tyler.

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Time: A Conversation at London’s Architectural Association – with Marko Milovanovic and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0700

In this conversation, held in May at the Architectural Association in London, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee and architect, artist, and journalist Marko Milovanovic talk about Time, our fifth annual print edition, and our exploration of the mystery that lies beyond our humancentric notions of Time. Ranging from the kinds of time that can bring us back into relationship with the living world, to the mystical Sufi poet Rumi, and the impulses shaping our print editions, this talk explores the vision behind Emergence to help reweave the worlds of ecology, culture, and spirituality, and once again understand the Earth is alive, animate, and sacred.

Read the transcript.

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Making the Invisible Visible – A Conversation with Marshmallow Laser Feast’s creative director Ersin Han Ersin

Tue, 21 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

In this conversation from our Shifting Landscapes exhibition, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is joined by Marshmallow Laser Feast creative director Ersin Han Ersin, one of the artists behind the exhibition’s large-scale installation, Breathing with the Forest, which invites you into an experience of exchanging breath with a forest in the Colombian Amazon. Talking about the ways MLF’s projects bring together science and imagination to illuminate the hidden connections within the living world, Ersin speaks to the power of sensory engagement, wonder, and awe to broaden our perception of more-than-human experiences.

Explore our special online adaptation of Breathing with the Forest.

Read the transcript.

Image courtesy of Marshmallow Laser Feast and Sandra Ciampone.

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A Forest Walk – A Guided Practice by Kimberly Ruffin

Tue, 14 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

When we step into a forest aware and listening to what surrounds us—remembering that the living world is just as aware of our presence—a relationship of reciprocity can take root. How might such a quality of attention change our ability to see, feel, and give ourselves to the landscapes around us? In this audio practice, writer and certified nature and forest therapy guide Kimberly Ruffin takes us on a sensory walk to meet the soil, sky, smells, and sounds of the forest. Encouraging us to “be a part of the music of a place,” this practice beckons us to witness, and be witnessed by, the living world.

Photo by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee.

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An Ethics of Wild Mind – A Conversation with David Hinton

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

How would our response to the ecological crisis be different if we understood that our own consciousness is as wild as the breathing Earth around us? In this conversation, poet, translator, and author David Hinton reaches back to a time when cultures were built around a reverence for the Earth and proposes that the sixth extinction we now face is rooted in philosophical assumptions about our separation from the living world. Urging us to reweave mind and landscape, he offers an ethics tempered by love and kinship as a way to navigate our era of disconnection.

Read the transcript.

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When the Earth Started to Sing – David G. Haskell

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

How did the vast and varied chorus of modern sounds—from forests to oceans to human music—emerge from within life’s community? When did the living Earth first start to sing? In this immersive sonic journey, biologist and acclaimed author David George Haskell opens our senses to unexplored auditory landscapes through spoken words and terrestrial sounds, tuning our ears to the tiny, trembling waves of sound all around us. Hearing three billion years of our planet’s sound evolution in the trills, bugles, clicks, and pulses of the life around him, David invites us into the space of connection with deep time and the more-than-human world that opens when we tune in to the Earth’s orchestra.

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.

Illustration by Daniel Liévano.

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Sanctuaries of Silence - A Listening Journey

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Equipped with his binaural microphone system, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton has spent the last forty years traveling the world documenting the sounds of the Earth and its inhabitants. Recording the noise pollution that permeates nearly all places on the planet, Gordon also listens for silence, for the sounds that emerge in the absence of noise. This week, we return to our audio adaptation of our virtual reality experience Sanctuaries of Silence—one of the first stories we released back in 2018. Guided by Gordon, we embark into the Hoh Rain Forest, one of the quietest places in North America. As he attunes our ears to its silence, we begin to hear the music of life emerge in every direction—the murmur of the river, the shuffle of trees, the cacophony of birdsong. We recommend putting on headphones for this one, so you can have the best listening experience.

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Fermentation as Metaphor - A Conversation with Sandor Katz

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

How can we repair our connection with what we eat, rejoining the biological web that we are a part of? In this conversation, fermentation expert Sandor Katz unpacks his book Fermentation as Metaphor, guiding us through the lessons taught by microorganisms as they change form. Exploring how our fear of the other, the unseen, and the unknowable has divorced us from the wonder of fermentation, Sandor shows us how engaging with microbial communities through food—breads, fungi, pickles, yogurts—can bring us into relationship with the tiny but vital unseen forces of the living world.

Read the transcript.

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Earth as Koan, Earth as Self – A Conversation with Susan Murphy Roshi

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

What becomes possible, especially in the face of crisis, when we orient our consciousness towards uncertainty, emptiness, and a sense of relationship with the world beyond the self? In this week’s conversation, Australian writer and Zen teacher Susan Murphy Roshi immerses us in the tradition of Zen koan and its ability to shift our consciousness amid crisis. Delving into the power of the not-knowing mind, Susan presents koan as a gateway to truly connecting with the world around us, and speaks to how we must respond to our moment of suffering from a place of openness if we are to remember our seamlessness with all of creation.

Read the transcript.

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Reading the Rocks – Jenny Odell

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Spending time with a landscape opens us to the language it speaks. Can we quiet our own voices enough to hear what the Earth has to say? This week, Jenny Odell takes us on a walk through the folds and furrows of her Oakland neighborhood, listening for the memories embedded in the shape of her surroundings. Sensing the language of her local terrain, she begins to tune in to the age-old conversation between rock and water. By cultivating this sustained attention, Jenny shows how we can ask a place, as we would a person, what is your story?

Read the essay.

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Holy Terroir: Finding Taste in an Edge-Place – Lily Kelting

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0700

How do we taste a landscape? In this narrated essay, food and culture scholar Lily Kelting immerses us in the sounds of construction, the presence of buffalo, and the fragrance of marigold, smoke, and trash that flavor the outskirts of Pune, India. Opening our senses to the terroir of her local milk—a union between cow, community, and land—she wonders how it can help us understand the diverse and robust ecology of this edge-place.

Read the essay.

Photo: Daniel J. Rao / Alamy

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Enraptured with Earth – Two talks by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0700

At our Shifting Landscapes retreat held at Sharpham Trust in Devon last summer, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee gave two talks that invite us to once again fall in love with the Earth. Feeling strongly that in this time of ecological unraveling the Earth is asking us to return Her ever-present gaze with our tenderness and care, Emmanuel urges us to expand our love to embrace Her in every moment, in every landscape.

Read the transcript.

Learn more about future events and gatherings from Emergence Magazine.

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Chasing Cicadas – Anisa George

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 12:00:00 -0700

In anticipation of this year’s massive cicada emergence, we revisit a story from Anisa George, where she calls us into the wonder of encountering these tiny messengers. Immersing us in the sound—the buzzing, whirring, and clicking—of cicadas, this story invites us into a community beyond the human. What can it mean to participate in such a cycle? Why together? Why now?

Read the transcript.

Design by Studio Airport.

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Finding Joy in the Unknown – A Conversation with Dara McAnulty

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Envisioning a future colored by a worsening ecological crisis makes for a despairing picture, but how can we find ways to keep our hearts open amid destruction? How can we express an authentic love for the living world in ways that invite others into a space of reverence? In this week’s podcast, we’re featuring a conversation from 2021 with Irish writer, naturalist, and activist Dara McAnulty. As he wonders what the future might look like if we activated change from a place of care, rather than fear, Dara uplifts joy as an essential tool in transforming our current moment.

Read the transcript.

Photo by Kate Peters.

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Deep Time Diligence – A Conversation with Tyson Yunkaporta

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0700

What would it mean to operate from a place of deep time diligence? In this conversation, Tyson Yunkaporta, an Aboriginal scholar and author who belongs to the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland, speaks with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee about deep-time thinking and the ways it can radically reshape our relationship to the cosmic order. Wondering how we can operate within our obligations to future generations, Tyson urges us, with the same candor and humor that tempers his books, to create story, data, and technology from a place of “right relationship.”

Read the transcript.

Photo by James Henry.

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Mycelial Landscapes – A Conversation with Merlin Sheldrake and Barney Steel

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Recorded live at our Shifting Landscapes exhibition in London last December, this conversation between Emergence Magazine executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, renowned mycologist and author Merlin Sheldrake, and Marshmallow Laser Feast creative director Barney Steel—who was behind the exhibition’s large-scale installation Breathing with the Forest—explores the mycelial webs that infiltrate and sustain our landscapes. Embracing the mystery and wonder of fungi as a means of deconstructing our Western philosophies around the self, the nature of intelligence, and the possibilities within community, each spoke to how the relational phenomenon of fungi could soften the imagined boundaries between our bodies and the great biosphere.

Read the transcript.

Artwork by Madge Evers.

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Glacial Longings – Elizabeth Rush

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Taking us to the collapsing face of Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, author Elizabeth Rush works to free the ice’s agency from both historical tropes and the confines of her own preconceptions. Contemplating the ways our own future is increasingly entangled with that of Thwaites, Elizabeth listens for the voice of the glacier, anticipating a quick, ready kinship. But as she recognizes the importance of time—“ribbons, reams, centuries, millennia” of temporal investment—in attuning oneself to the Earth’s responses, she surrenders to the slow unfolding conversation between humans and the more-than-human world.

Read the transcript.

Photo by Elizabeth Rush.

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Seeds of Reciprocity – A Panel Discussion with Kalyanee Mam, Joycelyn Longdon, and Sam Lee, moderated by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Held at our Shifting Landscapes exhibition in December last year, this panel discussion, moderated by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, brought together environmental justice activist and Climate in Colour founder Joycelyn Longdon, award-winning Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam, and folk singer, song collector, and author Sam Lee to consider how we might rekindle awe and reciprocity by remembering ourselves as extensions of the changing Earth. Centering narratives of kinship amid the uncertainty of our time—and inviting the surprise of spontaneous, emergent song—each share ways in which their work opens spaces of connection with the living world.

Read the transcript.

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Widening Circles – a conversation with Joanna Macy

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 12:00:00 -0700

From her first experiences of heart connection with the living world on her grandfather’s farm in upstate New York to her antinuclear activism in the late 1960s and her ongoing work with deep ecology, ecophilosopher and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy reflects on the threads woven throughout her life. Advocating for a return to an “ecological self” that recognizes our interdependence with the living world, Joanna considers how we might further bring love, courage, and connection into service during this time of climate catastrophe, remembering that we are, and always have been, home on this Earth.

Read the transcript.

Photo by Adam Loften.

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An Offering of Remembrance – a talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 12:00:00 -0700

We have forgotten the covenant of primordial love and reciprocal care with the Earth that existed from the beginning in favor of a story that casts humans as the center of the cosmos. As the fallout of this narrative culminates in the unprecedented transformation of our outer landscapes, our inner landscapes are also shifting in ways that demand our attention.

Given at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London in November 2023, this talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks to the possibility of profound inner transformation amid the great changes engulfing the Earth. Exploring the need to step away from a humancentric paradigm and towards a remembrance of the Earth as a divine being, Emmanuel asks: As so much falls away, what can we offer to the Earth? How can we place Earth back at the center of the story? What opens when love once again becomes present between us?

Read the transcript.

Image credit: Millennium Images / Gallery Stock.

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A Path Older Than Memory – A Conversation with Paul Salopek

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 12:00:00 -0700

In this conversation, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Paul Salopek, who is a decade into a remarkable journey retracing, on foot, the migration pathway taken by the first humans out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago. Speaking to us from the Liaoning province in northeastern China, Paul shares how moving at three miles per hour has deepened his personal relationship to time. As he becomes attuned to what he terms "sacramental time," the boundaries between the physical and metaphysical begin to blur into an expansive experience of timelessness.

Read the transcript.

Photo by Paul Salopek, National Geophraphic.

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Valemon The Bear: Myth in the Age of the Anthropocene – featuring Martin Shaw

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 12:00:00 -0700

In an audio adaptation of our multimedia experience “Valemon the Bear: Myth in the Age of the Anthropocene,” mythologist Martin Shaw takes us on a journey to the deepest parts of ourselves. Summoning the ancient tale of a wild daughter falling in love with a bear, Martin invites us into a deep encounter with a living myth that gossips across species, drawing us back into call-and-response with the more-than-human world.

Explore the multimedia experience.

Illustration by Martin Shaw.

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Be Earth Now – Rainer Maria Rilke recited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

In our final podcast of the year, a special selection of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry offers nourishment for heart and spirit. Twenty-five years ago, Buddhist scholar and eco-philosopher Joanna Macy collaborated with award-winning poet Anita Burrows to translate Rilke’s seminal collection of poetry, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, which explores the nature of God through divinely received prayers. In this reading, excerpted from the album Be Earth Now, produced by Fletcher Tucker at Gnome Life Records, Joanna and Anita recite some of these poems, reminding us of the ever-urgent call to love the world into being.

Cover artwork by Claire Collette.

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Sanctuary – Camille T. Dungy

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Witnessing the cry of the Earth, in its myriad permutations, can evoke real responses of grief and deep love for the planet. As we begin to acknowledge the wounds we’ve inflicted upon our nonhuman kin, how can tender connections with a harmed Earth foster spaces of healing? In this week’s podcast, poet and author Camille T. Dungy reaches for the possibility of sanctuary amid pain and loss. Bearing witness to an encounter between a man and an injured elephant, her poem offers us the opportunity to step into a moment where past harm gives way to an expansive recognition of love.

Read this poem.

Cover artwork by Studio Airport.

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And Peace Shall Return — Ben Okri

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

In this short story, Booker Prize–winning Nigerian author and poet Ben Okri envisions the tragedy and peace of a post-human world. Twenty thousand years into the future, an exploration of Earth uncovers the final notes and unfinished stories left by the last human beings in the twilight of their civilization. Reflecting on humanity’s genius for extraction and domination, this uncanny tale, narrated by acclaimed British actor Colin Salmon, follows our trajectory into extinction and invites the question: When will we truly comprehend the future we have seeded?

Read this story on our website.

Find “Thylacine” and other “Short Stories of Apocalypse,” in our inaugural print fiction collection.

Learn more about our current immersive exhibition in London. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES.

Cover artwork by Studio Airport.

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An Ecological Technology – A Conversation with James Bridle

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Interrogating where AI models originate from and who they serve, writer, artist, and technologist James Bridle questions our fundamental assumptions about intelligence in this expansive interview. Acknowledging the correlation between our narrow definition of intelligence and what our technologies look like, they wonder how an embrace of the unknowable and the unpredictable in our technology might in fact allow us to widen our thinking beyond the humancentric and step deeper into the mystery and intelligence of the living world.

Read the transcript.

Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES.

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Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System – Robin Wall Kimmerer

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

In one of our favorite stories, “Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System,” Potawatomi mother, scientist, and professor Robin Wall Kimmerer takes us through the nine-thousand-year existence of maize, reflecting on the ancient circle of reciprocity that links humans and corn and what has been severed in this once deeply sacred relationship. With an eye to the unsustainable industrial practices—GMOs, monoculture, use of toxic fertilizers—that continue to dominate the landscape of agriculture, Robin invites us to reconnect with the age-old teachings and kinships, held within plants, that are waiting to be remembered.

Explore this feature.

Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES.

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When You Could Hear the Trees – Kerri ní Dochartaigh

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

In this narrated essay, Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s experiences of pregnancy and motherhood bring her into an emerging realization of her own mammalhood. When she encounters her animal self, deeply embedded in the ecosystems around her, it transforms everything: her sense of home and safety; what it means to feel, to act, to care through the ancient, feral knowledge of instinct. Listening for teachings from the Earth, Kerri feels her way through the anguish and tenderness of raising a child in a burning and breaking—and beautiful—world.

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The Stories I Haven’t Been Told – Jamie Figueroa

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

How do our inheritances shape our lives? In this week’s narrated essay, Afro-Taína author Jamie Figueroa brings her pen to the erased and fragmented pages of her family’s history, exploring writing as a tool of revelation and reclamation amid a legacy of assimilation into white colonialist culture. 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 pieces of her identity.

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Be Dammed – Laia Jufresa

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

This week, we share a short story by Mexican author Laia Jufresa, translated by Sophie Hughes, that imagines the chaos of a world ravaged and divided by climate change. In “Be Dammed,” thousands of climate refugees find themselves forming settlements on boats as they wait endlessly to cross a heavily guarded border in pursuit of safety. One woman, tasked with holding prayers for their salvation, negotiates the entanglement of faith and politics as she considers who, or what, truly has the power to change their circumstances.

Read this short story.

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Portholes – Anna Badkhen

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

What can we learn from imprints in the earth about the ancient presences that left them behind? Acclaimed author Anna Badkhen traces markers left in the earth from the near and distant past, from the buffalo wallows of North America to the treasure-hiding game sekretiki she played as a child, from the histories held in whale earwax to the map of our human becoming in the Bouri Peninsula of modern-day Ethiopia. Reading each of these imprints as a kind of porthole—a window into memory, with all the retellings and reinterpretations characteristic of our messy, continual search for meaning—Anna wonders what lineage of impressions we might leave for the future.

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They Carry Us With Them: The Great Tree Migration – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

This week, we’ve adapted the interactive multimedia feature “They Carry Us With Them: The Great Tree Migration” for our podcast. Written by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, this story delves into changing patterns of tree migration in Maine, tracing the threats faced by black ash forests. As she follows two Wabanaki black ash basketmakers grappling with the arrival of an invasive beetle, Chelsea asks what is at stake as these forests struggle, change, and depart in their search for survival.

Explore the multimedia feature.

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Ravens and Doves – Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

In light of the intensifying climate crises we face today, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates examine the opposing narratives of survival embodied by two birds in perhaps the most abiding of all Flood myths—Noah’s Ark. Questioning the dove's familiar story of salvation for the few, they urge us to follow the raven into a new world of widened and inclusive refuge.

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The Place by the Sea – Masatsugu Ono

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

In this short story by Japanese author Masatsugu Ono, translated and narrated by Sam Malissa, a woman and her young son move to an abandoned seaside village along Japan’s eastern coast, where they’re met by the well-meaning attention of its curious last inhabitants and their wise old dog. As a typhoon rises from the sea, reality, memory, and illusion begin to collapse into one another—and the pair find themselves increasingly inseparable from the mysterious landscape.

Read this essay on our website.

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Look Closely, or You’ll Miss It – Natalie Rose Richardson

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

In this week’s essay, Natalie Rose Richardson begins to experience a quality of attention that birdwatching can cultivate. Learning from Chicago historian Sherry Williams, who has piloted programs exploring the relationship between bird migration and the Great Migration, and J. Drew Lanham, an ornithologist and poet whose work engages confluences of race, place, and nature, Natalie follows a migration path from Chicago to South Carolina that brings the practice of birdwatching together with her own layered history. In landscapes both new and familiar, she shows us what’s possible when we bear witness with eyes wide open.

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Antarctica the Woman – Stephanie Krzywonos

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Visiting the Ross Ice Shelf across several seasons, Stephanie Kryzwonos interrogates the heroic narratives of male exploration and conquest—written almost entirely by white men—that gender the land through feminine tropes. Might these characterizations, borne of a colonizing hunger to conquer and subdue, say more about the culture they come from than about the land they describe? What would happen, Stephanie asks, if we moved beyond fantasies and savior complexes, and instead approached Antarctica as a living place with agency?

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A Whale in the Desert: Tracing Paths of Migration in Turkana – Tristan McConnell

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Stepping into the Liminal – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

When we are both left with the fragments of a dying world and given glimpses of an emerging one; when there is so much beauty and destruction to be witnessed, how can we find our bearings? In this talk, given at Emergence’s recent Shifting Landscapes retreat held at Sharpham Trust in Devon, England, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee offers a frame for how we might navigate our current moment of unprecedented transition and transformation. Speaking to what can take root when we truly open ourselves to grief, love, and ultimately kinship with the living world, he urges us to step into the liminal—the space between worlds—to recognize an invitation into new ways of being.

Read the transcript.

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Speaking Wind-Words – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Animals in the Room: Why We Can and Should Listen to Other Species – Melanie Challenger

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Ancestral Structures on the Trailing Edge – Lauret E. Savoy

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Thylacine – Lydia Millet

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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When the Earth Started to Sing – David G. Haskell

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Butchering – Jake Skeets

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves – J. Drew Lanham

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0700

“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.

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Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet – David Abram

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Hidden Bayou – Nathaniel Rich.

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0700

“Did Nieux Swamp resemble the original deltaic marsh, before it had been ruined by sea level rise, shipping canals, and pipelines? Or had the Foundation’s engineers created an alien landscape?”

This week, acclaimed author Nathaniel Rich invites us to step into a short story that blurs the line between climate fiction and our emerging, engineered future. In “Hidden Bayou,” an actuary-turned-field-biologist follows an endangered bird through a man-made climate mitigation project funded by a multibillion dollar corporation. When a surprising encounter disrupts his duties, he is left to confront his own role in the eerie, manufactured landscape.

Read this climate fiction story on our website.

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Becoming Water: Black Memory in Slavery’s Afterlives – Makshya Tolbert

Tue, 30 May 2023 11:00:00 -0700

As our physical and cultural landscapes transform around us, what memories remain held by water? What histories of pain and destruction, what hallowed moments are carried in its currents, taken into its body like shards of glass, and resurface to haunt us, to guide us? In this narrated essay from our archive, 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.

Read the essay online on our website: emergencemagazine.org

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Saguaro, Free of the Earth – Boyce Upholt

Tue, 23 May 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Imagine a world where the mountains and glaciers, trees and waterways and animals—everything comprising our living, breathing planet—had as much a right to exist, legally, as humans. In this narrated essay, author Boyce Upholt travels to meet with the O’odham peoples of the Sonoran Desert, who have long revered the Saguaro cactus as a being with personhood. As Saguaro are bulldozed to make way for a segment of the US-Mexico border wall through Organ Pipe Cactus National Park, existing legal protections for the cactus come up against human-centric and extractive attitudes towards the Earth. Talking with elders from the Tohono O’odham Nation who are acting on behalf of the rooted beings of the desert, Boyce wonders how our Earth might transform if we recognized the dignity of all life.

Read the essay: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/saguaro-free-of-the-earth/

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In the Shifting Embrace of the Ganga – Arati Kumar-Rao

Tue, 16 May 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Visiting West Bengal during monsoon season, writer and photographer Arati Kumar-Rao bears witness to all that is formed and all that is destroyed in the swell and retreat of the Ganga. Struck by the immense power of the ancient river—a deity alive and accessible, benevolent and merciless—she wonders how human activity will continue to both affect and be determined by the will of its waters. As the Ganga transforms the lay of the land, shifting modern-day political boundaries, agricultural settlements, and historical constraints on its movement, Arati considers the confluence of the sacred and the profane.

Read the essay: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/in-the-shifting-embrace-of-the-ganga/

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Dwelling on Earth – Jay Griffiths

Tue, 09 May 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Soil has been described as the skin of the living world—vital, reactive, fragile and thin. Like our own skin, soil contains and protects a living, interdependent ecosystem that breathes, digests, and is finite in its ability to revitalize itself when harmed. In this rich, compendious story from our archive, author Jay Griffiths offers a love letter and a prayer to soil, marveling at the creativity and capacity of earthworms, fungi, and the pioneering water bear, soil-dwelling creatures who enable all other life. Jay looks frankly at how heavily we tread upon the land, describing the myriad threats to the health of the Earth’s soil and inviting us to commune with soil from a place of reverence and gratitude. After all, she reminds us, soil is what turns the Earth’s barren rock into the riotous life we know.

Read the essay: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/dwelling-on-earth/

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The Inward Migration in Apocalyptic Times – Alexis Wright

Tue, 02 May 2023 11:00:00 -0700

With native ecosystems and Indigenous lifeways perpetually under threat, acclaimed Australian Aboriginal author Alexis Wright considers how her enduring culture has responded to ongoing destruction. She turns inward to the dwelling place of ancestral story, to a space where the sovereignty of mind and imagination carry forward systems of knowledge that ensure the survival of her people. Understanding the intrinsic link between resilience and stories that regenerate the world we live in, Alexis looks towards the future and calls upon storytellers to help usher in the creation of a new world.

Read the essay: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-inward-migration-in-apocalyptic-times/

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Another Kind of Time – a conversation with Jenny Odell

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

How we experience time is, ultimately, how we experience our lives. In this conversation with Jenny Odell, artist and author of Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, she describes the social and cultural ideas that underpin our sense of standardized, mechanized time, which has laid an abstract grid over the living world. What choices, what futures, might become possible, she asks, if we allowed ourselves to slip free of the grip of linear, predictable chronos time and be swept into dynamic, interruptive kairos time?

Read the transcript: https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/another-kind-of-time/

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The Nightingale's Song – a conversation with Sam Lee

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

To mark the beginning of England’s nightingale season, we revisit our conversation with acclaimed folk singer, conservationist, and song collector Sam Lee, who steps into the forest each spring to sing with these beloved birds. In this interview, Sam reflects on the ancient musical kinship between humans and nightingales—melodies shared and silences exchanged—and the parallels between folk music and birdsong that embody deep connection to place. Finding a re-enchantment with the Earth through his practice, Sam speaks of the great importance of listening, and, as Britain’s nightingale population declines, a hope that music might offer the bird a path back into cultural consciousness.

Read the transcript: https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/the-nightingales-song/

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A Woman Meets an Owl, a Rattlesnake, and a Hummingbird – Greg Sarris

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

In this week’s podcast, Tribal Chairman and award-winning author Greg Sarris introduces us to the Crow Sisters, who tell of a young woman drawn on a mysterious journey to the lost village of Kobe·cha, near Sonoma Mountain in Northern California. Weaving traditional Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo creation tales with other histories of life in Northern California, Greg shows us the ways in which all stories—like all life—are deeply interconnected.

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Reindeer at the End of the World – Bathsheba Demuth

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

In this narrated essay from our archive, ecological historian Bathsheba Demuth explores the allure of the apocalyptic arc—the ending of an “old” world and the promise of a new, “perfect” one. As she crosses the easternmost edge of northern Russia, Bathsheba traces the rise and the ruin of the Soviet ideology that imposed its utopian vision of a tamed and commodified tundra upon the Native Chukchi people and their herds of reindeer. Finding uneasy parallels between such aims and today’s capitalist ideals, she considers survival against systems of power, and wonders how we might re-imagine the apocalyptic arc as the world as we know it ends.

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Monuments Upon the Tumultuous Earth – Boyce Upholt

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0700

For thousands of years, the southern Mississippi River has been shaping the land it traverses—and the structures humans have built along it. Over vast stretches of time, Indigenous societies were building hundred-foot pyramids, fifty-acre plazas, and intricate clusters of hillocks along this wild waterway. In this narrated essay, Boyce Upholt charts the shifting course of the river and the civilizations that have emerged alongside it. Beholding the 2,200-mile levee system that now curbs the river’s torrent, he wonders: what do our monuments say about who we are—and the crises we face?

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Valemon The Bear: Myth in the Age of the Anthropocene – featuring Martin Shaw

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0700

This week’s episode is an audio adaptation of our multimedia experience “Valemon the Bear: Myth in the Age of the Anthropocene,” featuring mythologist Martin Shaw. Martin’s vivid telling summons the ancient tale of a wild daughter falling in love with a bear, inviting us into a deep encounter with a living myth that has the potential to remind us of the parts of ourselves we’ve forgotten, if we let it.

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What Survives – Lacy M. Johnson

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0700

In this narrated essay, author Lacy M. Johnson reflects on what can be rebuilt and what must be mourned as our environments shift, fracture, and sometimes disappear. Walking through a wetlands that was once an upscale neighborhood in Houston, Lacy comes into contact with a landscape transformed by oil extraction and subsidence—one haunted by cycles of destruction. Feeling for the edge of change, she examines the value of restoration in the aftermath of disaster, and considers what futures could emerge, what places would survive, if we didn’t simply repair what is broken but adapted to what lies ahead.

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When You Meet the Monster, Anoint Its Feet – Bayo Akomolafe

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

In this narrated essay from our archive, Nigerian writer Bayo Akomolafe deconstructs old stories of colorism and puts forward “monstrosity”—that which upends the familiar, that which challenges and resists the order of things—as a site to truly meet ourselves. He presents race as emergent and dynamic, and identity as unwieldy, deeply composite, and intertwined with the living world. As the Anthropocene lays bare the interconnectedness and interdependence of all life, and dispels boundaries between human and nonhuman, Bayo invites us to disturb, rethink, and remake how we construct identity and race.

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The Fallout: Voices from Ukraine – Anna Badkhen et al.

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

One year has passed since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The conflict has unleashed unspeakable violence, killing hundreds of thousands of people, displacing millions from their homes, and inflicting untold suffering. And the war’s impact on Ukraine’s more-than-human life is just as unfathomable and long-lasting. In the face of such impossible reckoning, author Anna Badkhen brings together a compilation of vignettes by journalists, poets, and environmentalists in close proximity to the war. From the radioactive Red Forest of Chernobyl's Nuclear Exclusion Zone, to the liberated but heavily-mined Izium and the fragile ecosystems of the Ukrainian steppes, “The Fallout”' coalesces into what Anna calls “a schrapneled bearing in time” and makes visible a landscape fractured, disoriented, and deeply harmed.

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Creatures That Don’t Conform – Lucy Jones

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

In this essay, author Lucy Jones brims with awe upon discovering slime molds in the woods near her home. As she is increasingly drawn down to the forest floor and into their world of nonconformity, she explores what might happen if, rather than trying to decipher such creatures, we instead bask in the wonder of their obscurity. Lucy is a journalist and author living in England, whose books include Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild.

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Sanctuaries of Silence – A Listening Journey

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

In this immersive listening journey from our archive, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton guides us into the Hoh Rain Forest—one of the quietest places in North America. In a world drowned out by the din of modern life, Hempton offers a way to attune our ears to the sounds that emerge in the absence of noise and reconnect with the silence of the living world.

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An Ethics of Wild Mind – a conversation with David Hinton

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

David Hinton is a poet, translator, and author whose works are informed by ancient Chinese philosophy and deep ecological thought. In this interview, David discusses his latest book Wild Mind, Wild Earth, which looks to ancient modes of seeing and being as a way to ground the modern environmental movement. Advocating for a return to a deep kinship between humans and the Earth, David speaks about how reweaving consciousness and landscape might help us navigate the sixth extinction with an ethics tempered by love.

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Kinship, Community, and Consciousness – a conversation with Richard Powers

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0700

This week we revisit our conversation with Richard Powers, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Overstory, a story that reweaves the fabric of our reality by entangling us within “plant consciousness.” Richard discusses the kind of storytelling that acknowledges the reciprocal, communal existence of all living things, how life-changing these stories can be, and how they might help shape our response to the ecological crisis.

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Finding Joy in the Unknown – a conversation with Dara McAnulty

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0700

This week we’re re-sharing our interview with Irish teenage author, naturalist, and conservationist Dara McAnulty. His debut book, Diary of a Young Naturalist—which he wrote at the age of fourteen, and which is in part an intimate portrait of his love of the living world and his distress at its destruction—is a testament to the power and importance of joy, a joy that encircles his relationship with nature. In a world where many are incentivized to act out of fear, Dara’s instinct to wonder at all that unfolds around him feels regenerative—a return to the essence of our connection with the living Earth.

In this conversation we spoke about the importance of approaching living in an era of crisis from a place grounded in joy, and his realization that writing, music, and art can be activism.

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Prophecies of Possibility: A Ripening of the Next World – Jamie Figueroa

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Jamie Figueroa is Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio and a long-time resident of northern New Mexico. She is the author of the novel Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer. In this narrated essay, Jamie considers the kind of world she wants to inhabit and the stories that will make it so. Confronted with narratives of catastrophe and colonialism that restrict her spirit, she summons the imagination, sovereignty, and courage needed to restory herself and rebirth the world.

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Ten Love Letters to the Earth – Thich Nhat Hanh read by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0700

The Vietnamese Buddhist monk and Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh died nearly one year ago, on January 22, 2022. To honor his passing, we are re-sharing his “Ten Love Letters to the Earth,” a series of meditations that engage us in intimate conversation with our Earth. As we now approach the one year anniversary of his death, we offer these recitations in remembrance.

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A Primordial Covenant of Relationship – An Evening in London with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

In this talk given at St. Ethelburga's Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London, Sufi teacher and Emergence Executive Editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks about what it looks like to live in an unfolding apocalyptic reality and the creative possibilities that are waiting to be embodied. In this time of deep uncertainty, he reminds us of the ancient, primordial covenant of relationship with the living world that can give us a ground to stand on, and the sacred nature of creation that is always there, waiting for us to return to it.

Read the transcript.

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After the End – Ben Okri read by Colin Salmon

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

As we come to the end of Living with the Unknown, we begin again at the beginning. For the final story of our third volume, we journey into the fictional, post-apocalyptic landscape of acclaimed Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri. In this short story, superbly narrated by British actor Colin Salmon, a man and a woman inhabit a world abandoned by humans, grappling with what is at stake in beginning a new civilization.

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.”

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An Ecological Technology – A Conversation with James Bridle

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

In this expansive interview, writer, artist, and technologist James Bridle seeks to widen our thinking beyond humancentric ways of knowing. In questioning our fundamental assumptions about intelligence, they explore how radical technological models can decentralize power and become portals into deeper relationship with the living world.

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The Inward Migration in Apocalyptic Times – Alexis Wright

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance – Robin Wall Kimmerer

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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Coming into Being: Reflections on Mothering in the Apocalypse – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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Finding the Mother Tree – A Conversation with Suzanne Simard

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Spirit of the Wetlands – Julian Hoffman

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves – J. Drew Lanham

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.”

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Coming Home to the Cove: A Story of Family, Memory, and Stolen Land – Episode 3

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Coming Home to the Cove: A Story of Family, Memory, and Stolen Land – Episode 2

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Coming Home to the Cove: A Story of Family, Memory, and Stolen Land – Episode 1

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Beings Seen and Unseen – A Conversation with Amitav Ghosh

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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My Wild-Like Refuge – J. Drew Lanham

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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My Name Is Beauty – Jake Skeets

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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When the Earth Started to Sing – David G. Haskell

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Of Wandering Angels and Lost Landmarks – Daegan Miller

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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They Carry Us With Them: The Great Tree Migration – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Giantstone – Andri Snær Magnason

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.”

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Sanctuary – Camille T. Dungy

Tue, 09 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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War on the Air: Ecologies of Disaster – Daisy Hildyard

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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?

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To See Beyond: A Hoping in Three Pictures – Anna Badkhen

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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?

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Noiseless Messengers – Rebecca Giggs

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Vagrants: Butterfly Land Grabs and Other Climate Migrations – Cal Flyn

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Living with the Unknown Soundtrack – Volker Bertelmann

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Chasing Cicadas – Anisa George

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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”.

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Where the Horses Sing – Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Widening Circles – a conversation with Joanna Macy

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Creatures of the World Have Not Been Chastened – Lia Purpura

Tue, 31 May 2022 13:29:25 -0700

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.”

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Navigating the Mysteries – Martin Shaw

Tue, 24 May 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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?

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The Nightingale's Song – a conversation with Sam Lee

Tue, 03 May 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Ancient Green: Moss, Climate, and Deep Time – Robin Wall Kimmerer

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Finding the Mother Tree – a conversation with Suzanne Simard

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Watering the Dead and the Unseen – Sumana Roy

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Saguaro, Free of the Earth – Boyce Upholt

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Eternal Tree – Jori Lewis

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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False Passives – Anna Badkhen

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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On Death and Love – Melanie Challenger

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Birder to Birder – J. Drew Lanham

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 12:00:00 -0700

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?

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When the Earth Started to Sing – David G. Haskell

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 12:00:00 -0700

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Becoming Water: Black Memory in Slavery’s Afterlives – Makshya Tolbert

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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Ten Love Letters to the Earth – Thich Nhat Hanh read by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 08:00:00 -0700

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.

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Coming Home to the Cove: A Story of Family, Memory, and Stolen Land – Episode 3

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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Coming Home to the Cove: A Story of Family, Memory, and Stolen Land – Episode 2

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 12:00:00 -0700

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Coming Home to the Cove: A Story of Family, Memory, and Stolen Land – Episode 1

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 12:00:00 -0700

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From Dirt – Camille T. Dungy

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Ecology of Perception – a conversation with David Abram

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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An Unbroken Grace – Fred Bahnson

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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A Whale in the Desert: Tracing Paths of Migration in Turkana – Tristan McConnell

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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Be Earth Now – Rainer Maria Rilke recited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

Tue, 07 Dec 2021 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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Beings Seen and Unseen – a conversation with Amitav Ghosh

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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Reseeding the Food System – a conversation with Rowen White

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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They Carry Us With Them – Pt. 2: Sugar Maple, Paper Birch, and Red Spruce

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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They Carry Us With Them – Pt. 1: Introduction and Black Ash

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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Making Relatives – Diane Wilson

Tue, 02 Nov 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Finding Joy in the Unknown – a conversation with Dara McAnulty

Tue, 26 Oct 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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A Little More Than Kin – Richard Powers

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Invasives: Unknitting Despair in a Tangled Landscape – Catherine Bush

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Language Keepers, Episode 4: Wukchumni

Tue, 05 Oct 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Atascosa Borderlands – Jack Dash and Luke Swenson

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Living in the Bones – Bathsheba Demuth

Tue, 21 Sep 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Speaking the Anthropocene – a conversation with Robert Macfarlane

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Against Nature Writing – Charles Foster

Tue, 07 Sep 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Paradise Extended – Natalie Rose Richardson

Tue, 27 Jul 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves – J. Drew Lanham

Tue, 20 Jul 2021 14:27:42 -0700

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.

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Meltwater: A Timepiece for the Arctic – Stephen Lezak

Tue, 13 Jul 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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A Forest Walk – a guided practice by Kimberly Ruffin

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Life Story of a Recipe – Gina Rae La Cerva

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Return of the Foreigners – Nick Hunt

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Forest of Orchids – Heather Swan

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Nightingale's Song – a conversation with Sam Lee

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Where the Horses Sing – Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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We’re Gonna Carry That Weight a Long Time – David Farrier

Tue, 25 May 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Turn Towards the Dark – Hala Alyan

Tue, 18 May 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Ravens and Doves – Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates

Tue, 11 May 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Finding the Mother Tree – a conversation with Suzanne Simard

Tue, 04 May 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Voices of Birds and the Language of Belonging – David G. Haskell

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Sanctuaries of Silence

Tue, 20 Apr 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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QIKIQTAĠRUK: Almost an Island – Lauren Oakes

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Be Earth Now – Rainer Maria Rilke recited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

Tue, 06 Apr 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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River at the Heart of the World – Arati Kumar-Rao

Tue, 30 Mar 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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On Time and Water – a conversation with Andri Snær Magnason

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Stories I Haven’t Been Told – Jamie Figueroa

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Once I Took a Weeklong Walk in the Sahara – Anna Badkhen

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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Keeping the World in Being: Meditations on Longing – Fred Bahnson

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 12:00:00 -0700

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.”

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Thirteen to One: New Stories for an Age of Disaster – Marie Mutsuki Mockett

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 12:00:00 -0700

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.”

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A Convergent Imagining – J. Drew Lanham

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Inward Migration in Apocalyptic Times – Alexis Wright

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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Unraveling the Stitches – Kalyanee Mam

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Druid Renaissance – Lucy Jones

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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Illuminating Kirinyaga – Tristan McConnell

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Coronavirus Pandemic and the Invisibility of Nature – Michael McCarthy

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 12:00:00 -0700

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.”

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The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance – Robin Wall Kimmerer

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 12:00:00 -0700

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.”

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Radical Dharma – a conversation with angel Kyodo williams

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 12:00:00 -0700

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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The Meaning of Air – Boyce Upholt

Tue, 08 Dec 2020 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Memory Field – Jake Skeets

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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Reseeding the Food System – an Interview with Rowen White

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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Coyote Story – CMarie Fuhrman

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 12:00:00 -0700

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.”

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Reindeer at the End of the World – Bathsheba Demuth

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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Fermentation as Metaphor – a conversation with Sandor Katz

Tue, 03 Nov 2020 12:00:00 -0700

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.

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East to Eden – Roger Deakin with Robert Macfarlane

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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My Mother’s Hands – Gina Rae La Cerva

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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?

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Desire Paths – David Farrier

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Language Keepers, Episode 6: The Power of Revitalization

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Language Keepers, Episode 5: Kawaiisu

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Language Keepers, Episode 4: Wukchumni

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Language Keepers, Episode 3: Karuk

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Language Keepers, Episode 2: Tolowa Dee-ni’

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Language Keepers, Episode 1: Colonizing California

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Creatures of the World Have Not Been Chastened – Lia Purpura

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Negative Love — Daisy Hildyard

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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And Peace Shall Return — Ben Okri

Tue, 11 Aug 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Basilisk — Paul Kingsnorth

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Ecology of Perception – David Abram

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Ink — Sjón

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Thylacine — Lydia Millet

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Lord God Bird: Apocalyptic Prophecy & the Vanishing of Avifauna – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

Tue, 07 Jul 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Sweet Breath from Another – Crystal Wilkinson

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Courting the Wild Twin – Martin Shaw

Fri, 26 Jun 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Other House: Musings on the Diné Perspective of Time – Jake Skeets

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Beginning with the End – Roy Scranton

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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And God Laughs – Amaud Jamaul Johnson

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Pickled Limes – Kalyanee Mam

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Life in the Time of Cholera: Lessons on a Pandemic – George Prochnik

Tue, 26 May 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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?

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Sanctuaries of Silence

Tue, 19 May 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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Robin Wall Kimmerer in Conversation with Robert Macfarlane

Tue, 12 May 2020 10:00:00 -0700

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.

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This Is Not a Rehearsal – Hala Alyan

Tue, 05 May 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

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I Am Not Your Peril – Lisa Lee Herrick

Fri, 01 May 2020 11:00:00 -0700

In the wake of COVID-19, Lisa Lee Herrick challenges the resurgence of dangerous historical frames of race and belonging.

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In the Ground of Our Unknowing – David Abram

Fri, 24 Apr 2020 19:54:27 -0700

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/

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What Difference Does a Day Make? Earth Day at Fifty – Paul Elie

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 20:27:16 -0700

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.

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Among the Trees – Carl Phillips

Tue, 07 Apr 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

https://emergencemagazine.org/story/among-the-trees

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The Poet and the Palm Tree – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

Tue, 31 Mar 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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/

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Shaking the Viral Tree – a conversation with David Quammen

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 21:34:56 -0700

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.

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Woods Work – William Bryant Logan

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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/

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One Hundred and Eleven Trees – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

Tue, 17 Mar 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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.

www.emergencemagazine.org/story/111-trees

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On Survival: the Dead, the Sapling, and the Ancients – Lauren E. Oakes

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 11:00:00 -0700

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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The Church Forests of Ethiopia – Fred Bahnson

Tue, 03 Mar 2020 12:00:00 -0700

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.

https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-church-forests-of-ethiopia

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Dead Wood – Nick Hunt

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 12:00:00 -0700

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.

https://emergencemagazine.org/story/dead-wood

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Felling Light – Amaud Jamaul Johnson

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 12:00:00 -0700

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/

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Eleven Ways of Smelling a Tree – David G. Haskell

Tue, 11 Feb 2020 12:00:00 -0700

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/

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Kinship, Community, and Consciousness – a conversation with Richard Powers

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 21:18:00 -0700

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.

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On Time and Water – a conversation with Andri Snær Magnason

Tue, 10 Dec 2019 00:09:25 -0700

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.

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A Radical Reimagining of the Novel with Richard Powers and Forrest Gander

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 18:08:37 -0700

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.

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Reseeding the Food System – Rowen White

Fri, 22 Nov 2019 21:17:00 -0700

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.

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The Pull of the Sky — Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Thu, 24 Oct 2019 22:50:07 -0700

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.

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Tending Soil — Emma Marris

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 19:18:18 -0700

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.

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The Seeds of Ancestors: A Day at Soul Fire Farm – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 19:18:02 -0700

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.

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Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts — Crystal Wilkinson

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 19:18:00 -0700

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.

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Dwelling on Earth — Jay Griffiths

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 19:17:00 -0700

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.

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We Learned to Fear Tiger and to Love Squirrel – Lisa Lee Herrick

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 19:14:00 -0700

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.

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Fermenting Culture – David Zilber

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 19:13:00 -0700

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.

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Speaking the Anthropocene – Robert Macfarlane

Fri, 21 Jun 2019 20:37:00 -0700

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.”

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The Language of the Master – Paul Kingsnorth

Fri, 21 Jun 2019 20:34:00 -0700

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.”

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Atlas with Shifting Edges – Elizabeth Rush

Fri, 21 Jun 2019 20:32:27 -0700

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.

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The Voices of Birds and the Language of Belonging – David G. Haskell

Fri, 21 Jun 2019 20:29:00 -0700

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.”

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On the Language of the Deep Blue – Charles Foster

Fri, 21 Jun 2019 20:25:00 -0700

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.”

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Losing Language – Camille T. Dungy

Fri, 21 Jun 2019 20:23:04 -0700

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.

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A Forest Walk – Practice Guided by Kimberly Ruffin

Wed, 22 May 2019 22:06:00 -0700

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.

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Ancient Root – Linda Hogan

Mon, 15 Apr 2019 16:18:44 -0700

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.

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Wave Patterns – Aylie Baker

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 20:10:00 -0700

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

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The Religious Value of the Unknown – George Prochnik

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 01:26:00 -0700

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.

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Radical Dharma – angel Kyodo williams

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 01:26:00 -0700

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.”

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Bodies of Evidence – Kimberly Ruffin

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 01:25:06 -0700

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.

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Lone Moon Lights Cold Spring – Bill Porter (Red Pine)

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 01:25:00 -0700

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.

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A Letter to my Husband – Hala Alyan

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 01:24:22 -0700

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.

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Imagining Burial – Lia Purpura

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 01:24:00 -0700

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.

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Ecological Conversion – Paul Elie

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 01:24:00 -0700

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.

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Hallowed Ground – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 01:23:00 -0700

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.

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Myrtle's Medicine – Kinitra Brooks

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 00:45:00 -0700

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.

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On the Road with Thomas Merton – Fred Bahnson

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 00:42:00 -0700

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.

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Born was the Mountain – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 15:00:00 -0700

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.

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Magic and the Machine — David Abram

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 15:00:00 -0700

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.

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Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System – Robin Wall Kimmerer

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 15:00:00 -0700

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.

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When You Meet the Monster, Anoint His Feet – Bayo Akomolafe

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 15:00:00 -0700

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.

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The Great Work: Alchemy and the Power of Words – Paul Kingsnorth

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 15:00:00 -0700

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.

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Myth of Progress — An Interview with Paul Kingsnorth

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 15:00:00 -0700

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.

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Winds of Awe and Fear — Nick Hunt

Tue, 10 Jul 2018 18:22:19 -0700

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.

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Mud and Antler Bone — Martin Shaw

Tue, 10 Jul 2018 18:12:15 -0700

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.

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Wildwood — Kara Moses

Tue, 10 Jul 2018 17:59:00 -0700

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.

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On Being Alone — Craig Childs

Tue, 10 Jul 2018 17:53:00 -0700

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.

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From Dirt — Camille T. Dungy

Tue, 10 Jul 2018 17:48:00 -0700

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Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet — David Abram

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 23:45:00 -0700

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.

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A Storm Blown from Paradise — Paul Kingsnorth

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:26:00 -0700

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.

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Wild Fire, Flat Water — Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

Thu, 05 Apr 2018 20:45:00 -0700

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.

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Widening Circles — Joanna Macy

Thu, 05 Apr 2018 18:51:00 -0700

In this interview, Buddhist eco-philosopher Joanna Macy discusses her personal journey into the worlds of anti-nuclear activism, Buddhism, and deep ecology.

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