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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
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 comm...
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. Learn...
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 Tom...
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'...
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 thi...
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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, Fre...
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...
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, collabo...
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,...
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/...
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoi...
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
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 Lif e. In this essay, Diane asks what it means to...
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 ...
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...
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 transplante...
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 effor...
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 ...
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphon...
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
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 more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
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. Learn mor...
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 Kim...
