Emergence Magazine Podcast

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...

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 wh...

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 ma...

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 t...

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 metaphysi...

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 growin...

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...

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 spru...

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 o...

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, an...

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 l...

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 spea...

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...

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...

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...

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 philo...

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 th...

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 ruthlessl...

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 livin...

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 worl...

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...

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...

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 in...

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 e...

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...