I Am Not Your Peril – Lisa Lee Herrick
In the wake of COVID-19, Lisa Lee Herrick challenges the resurgence of dangerous historical frames of race and belonging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
May 01, 2020•43 min
Emergence Magazine Podcast
Emergence Magazine is an award-winning magazine exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture and spirituality. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, author-narrated essays, fiction, multipart series, and more. We feature new podcast episodes weekly on Tuesdays.
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Episodes
In the Ground of Our Unknowing – David Abram
Facing the paradoxes and ambiguities enmeshed with the COVID-19 pandemic, David Abram finds beauty in the midst of shuddering terror. As we’re isolated in this uncertain time, he writes, we can turn to the more-than-human world to empower our empathy for each other. Read the essay on our site: https://emergencemagazine.org/story/our-unknowing/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Apr 24, 2020•27 min
What Difference Does a Day Make? Earth Day at Fifty – Paul Elie
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 o...
Apr 20, 2020•57 min
Among the Trees – Carl Phillips
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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Apr 07, 2020•20 min
The Poet and the Palm Tree – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
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 ...
Mar 31, 2020•35 min
Shaking the Viral Tree – a conversation with David Quammen
In this interview, science writer David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, speaks about the root causes underlying the current pandemic and explores the ways in which viruses are embedded in the same systems of ecology and evolutionary biology that we are. As we disrupt wild ecosystems and shake these viruses free, COVID-19 offers an opportunity to reimagine our relationship with the natural world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adc...
Mar 25, 2020•38 min
Woods Work – William Bryant Logan
After visiting a two-thousand-year-old Linden tree in England, William Bryant Logan explores the nearly forgotten practice of coppicing, or cutting back a tree to stimulate growth, and discovers a symbiotic relationship between humans and trees. William is the author of Sprout Lands , Oak , Air, and Dirt . He is a certified arborist and serves on the faculty of the New York Botanical Garden. https://emergencemagazine.org/story/woods-work/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adch...
Mar 24, 2020•38 min
One Hundred and Eleven Trees – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 17, 2020•1 hr
On Survival: the Dead, the Sapling, and the Ancients – Lauren E. Oakes
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/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Mar 10, 2020•36 min
The Church Forests of Ethiopia – Fred Bahnson
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://eme...
Mar 03, 2020•1 hr 13 min
Dead Wood – Nick Hunt
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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Feb 25, 2020•31 min
Felling Light – Amaud Jamaul Johnson
In this essay, Amaud Jamaul Johnson returns to his poem “The Maple Remains” for the centennial anniversary of the Red Summer of 1919. Through historical witnessing we see the deep ties between racial and arboreal scars. Amaud is an award-winning poet and the author of Darktown Follies and Red Summer . https://emergencemagazine.org/story/felling-light/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Feb 18, 2020•32 min
Eleven Ways of Smelling a Tree – David G. Haskell
In this multi-sensory essay, David George Haskell invites us into the unique, and sometimes surprising, aromas of eleven different species of trees. David is author of The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors and The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature. https://emergencemagazine.org/story/eleven-ways/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Feb 11, 2020•1 hr 1 min
Kinship, Community, and Consciousness – a conversation with Richard Powers
In this extensive interview, Richard Powers discusses his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory and his intention to tell a story in which humans are not separate from the living world around them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Feb 03, 2020•1 hr 5 min
On Time and Water – a conversation with Andri Snær Magnason
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 futur...
Dec 10, 2019•1 hr
A Radical Reimagining of the Novel with Richard Powers and Forrest Gander
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...
Nov 25, 2019•54 min
Reseeding the Food System – Rowen White
Rowen White is a Seed Keeper from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and an activist for seed sovereignty. In this in-depth interview, Rowen shares what seeds—her greatest teachers—have shown her: that resilience is rooted in diversity, and that all of us carry encoded memories of how to plant and care for seeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nov 22, 2019•48 min
The Pull of the Sky — Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
In this narrated essay from our first issue on Perspective, medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen examines the history of our attraction to see Earth from above. He wonders what an enlarged perspective might bring. Does it offer a deeper understanding of ourselves as Earthlings or is this attraction an indulgence in a dangerous fantasy that we might be free of the gravity, and complexity, of life on Earth. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is the author of Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman and Earth . Learn more a...
Oct 24, 2019•19 min
Tending Soil — Emma Marris
From her own backyard compost pile in Oregon to the dark earths of the Amazon and Liberia, Emma Marris explores the possibility that there is more to our ancient kinship with soil than nutrient extraction. Emma is the author of Rambunctious Garden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Oct 23, 2019•35 min
The Seeds of Ancestors: A Day at Soul Fire Farm – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol farmer and food justice activist. This profile explores her work to create spaces for people of color to heal and reconnect to the land—an effort to end America’s food apartheid system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Oct 23, 2019•35 min
Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts — Crystal Wilkinson
Raised on her grandmother’s jam cake, biscuits, and sweet black tea, Crystal Wilkinson evokes a legacy of joy, love, and plenty in the culinary traditions of Black Appalachia. Crystal is the author of The Birds of Opulence , Water Street , and Blackberries, Blackberries . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Oct 23, 2019•32 min
Dwelling on Earth — Jay Griffiths
Marveling at worms, fungi, and the pioneering water bear, Jay Griffiths brings our attention to what dwells beneath our feet, inviting us to remember that soil is what turns the Earth’s barren rock into the riotous life we know. Jay is the author of Anarchipelago , Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time , Wild: an Elemental Journey , and A Love Letter from a Stray Moon . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Oct 23, 2019•36 min
We Learned to Fear Tiger and to Love Squirrel – Lisa Lee Herrick
In the storied universe of Hmong cosmology, Squirrel is revered for its ability to outsmart the hunter. In this narrated essay, Lisa Lee Herrick recalls her grandfather—a master squirrel hunter—bringing home a squirrel for spicy hunter’s stew, and how this dish helped unravel a hidden past. Lisa is an award-winning writer, artist, community organizer, and media specialist who helped produce the film, The Hmong and The Secret War , now available online at PBS.org. Learn more about your ad choices...
Oct 23, 2019•45 min
Fermenting Culture – David Zilber
In this in-depth interview, David Zilber, director of the fermentation lab at Noma—named the best restaurant in the world—discusses how food is culture, but fermentation is culture on a deeper level. David has worked at Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark, since 2014 and is the co-author of The Noma Guide to Fermentation . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Oct 23, 2019•47 min
Speaking the Anthropocene – Robert Macfarlane
In this in-depth interview, writer Robert Macfarlane takes listeners on a journey through language and landscape, exploring how a precision of utterance and a grammar of reciprocity can summon wonder in our encounters with place. Robert is the author of “The Old Ways,” “The Wild Places,” “Mountains of the Mind,” “Landmarks,” and “Underland.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jun 21, 2019•1 hr 16 min
The Language of the Master – Paul Kingsnorth
Paul Kingsnorth faces his suspicion that modern written language is in fact a tool of ecocide. Paul is the author of the novels “The Wake” and “Beast,” the essay collection “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,” and the poetry collection “Songs from the Blue River.” His latest book is “Savage Gods: A Crisis of Words.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jun 21, 2019•27 min
Atlas with Shifting Edges – Elizabeth Rush
Elizabeth Rush reflects on climate change as a transformational force on our landscapes and the words we might use to grasp this shifting reality. Her book “Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore” was recently nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for its rigorous reporting on America’s vulnerability to rising seas. This narrated essay is an account of the days she spent driving through the Pacific Northwest while on a tour for the book—a time of wildfires, loss, and possible futures. Learn mor...
Jun 21, 2019•23 min
The Voices of Birds and the Language of Belonging – David G. Haskell
David Haskell enters the intricate and generative soundscape of the world of birds, inviting us to join in a practice of cross-species listening as a bridge to kinship. David is the author of “The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors” and “The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jun 21, 2019•24 min
On the Language of the Deep Blue – Charles Foster
In an effort to seek out a language beyond the human, Charles Foster travels to the Isle of Skye to listen to the intricate vocalizations of the eight remaining Scottish killer whales. Charles is the author of more than twenty books, including “Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide” and “Wired for God: The Biology of Spiritual Experience.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jun 21, 2019•27 min
Losing Language – Camille T. Dungy
Rejecting the refrain “there are no words,” author and poet Camille T. Dungy reaches for a language that can encompass the experience of loneliness, erasure, and loss. Camille is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently “Trophic Cascade,” and a collection of personal essays, “Guidebook to Relative Strangers.” She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jun 21, 2019•31 min
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