Emergence Magazine Podcast

“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 creativi...

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 re...

“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-b...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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. Understand...

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...

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 a...

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...

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...

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 civiliz...

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 le...

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, s...

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 Anthrop...

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 brin...

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...

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

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...

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...

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 wi...

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,...

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. Learn more about your ad choices. V...

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...