Emergence Magazine Podcast

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 revit...

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...

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...

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...

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 tang...

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 k...

J. Drew Lanham is a birder, naturalist, and hunter-conservationist. He is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature . In this powerful reading, Drew recites his poem Joy is the Justice we Give Ourselves , a celebration of the radical act of joy through lifting up liberation, reparations, justice, and deep connection to ancestors and the living world. Learn mo...

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...

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 Emerge...

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 tim...

Nick Hunt is a writer, journalist, and storyteller, and the author of Walking the Woods and the Water and Where the Wild Winds Are . In this essay, Nick ventures into the Forest of Dean, an ancient mixed woodland, where he searches for the unruly, twilight realm of the boar—a creature who brings him to the boundary between wildness and civilization, history and myth. Learn more about your ad choic...

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 res...

In this interview, which weaves conversation, song, and the music of nightingales, folk singer Sam Lee speaks about the transformative experience of collaborating with nightingales, the stories of ancestors passed through folk music, and the space for communion that is opened with silence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee is a writer and Sufi teacher whose work focuses on spiritual responsibility in our present time of transition. His many books include A Handbook for Survivalists: Caring for the Earth, A Series of Meditations . In this essay, as Llewellyn witnesses the growing wasteland that we are creating, he seeks the threshold that could bring us back to the place where the land sings—a d...

David Farrier is the author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils , a meditation on the Anthropocene and a search for the fossils that humans are leaving behind. In this essay, David reflects on the material weight of human-made objects and on the home as a structure that holds and records the trace of our presence on the Earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hala Alyan is a clinical psychologist, poet, and author. In this essay she reluctantly steps into the realm of fear in order to reckon with a precarious world. In the context of the pandemic and personal loss and trauma, she explores the psychology of being afraid, the presence of demons, and practices of courage and surrender.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the face of present-day environmental catastrophe and social injustice, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates examine opposing narratives of survival in the story of Noah’s Ark, exemplified in the dove and the raven. While one symbolizes an exclusionary new world with a finite narrative arc and an inevitable conclusion, the other embodies the unexpected and unscripted—a widened refuge open to a...

In this in-depth interview, Dr. Suzanne Simard—the renowned scientist who discovered the “wood-wide web”—speaks about mother trees, kin recognition, and how to heal our separation from the living world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David G. Haskell is the author of “The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors” and “The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature.” In this narrated essay originally published in 2019, David enters the intricate and generative soundscape of the world of birds, inviting us to join in a practice of cross-species listening as a bridge to kinship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

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 wh...

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 mee...

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...

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,...

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...

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....