Recorded live at our Shifting Landscapes exhibition in London last December, this conversation between Emergence Magazine executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, renowned mycologist and author Merlin Sheldrake, and Marshmallow Laser Feast creative director Barney Steel—who was behind the exhibition’s large-scale installation Breathing with the Forest— explores the mycelial webs that infiltrate and sustain our landscapes. Embracing the mystery and wonder of fungi as a means of deconstructing our W...
Feb 13, 2024•1 hr 7 min
Taking us to the collapsing face of Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, author Elizabeth Rush works to free the ice’s agency from both historical tropes and the confines of her own preconceptions. Contemplating the ways our own future is increasingly entangled with that of Thwaites, Elizabeth listens for the voice of the glacier, anticipating a quick, ready kinship. But as she recognizes the importance of time—“ribbons, reams, centuries, millennia” of temporal investment—in attuning oneself to the E...
Feb 06, 2024•35 min
Held at our Shifting Landscapes exhibition in December last year, this panel discussion, moderated by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, brought together environmental justice activist and Climate in Colour founder Joycelyn Longdon, award-winning Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam, and folk singer, song collector, and author Sam Lee to consider how we might rekindle awe and reciprocity by remembering ourselves as extensions of the changing Earth. Centering narratives of kinship amid the uncertainty of...
Jan 30, 2024•1 hr 9 min
From her first experiences of heart connection with the living world on her grandfather’s farm in upstate New York to her antinuclear activism in the late 1960s and her ongoing work with deep ecology, ecophilosopher and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy reflects on the threads woven throughout her life. Advocating for a return to an “ecological self” that recognizes our interdependence with the living world, Joanna considers how we might further bring love, courage, and connection into service during...
Jan 23, 2024•35 min
We have forgotten the covenant of primordial love and reciprocal care with the Earth that existed from the beginning in favor of a story that casts humans as the center of the cosmos. As the fallout of this narrative culminates in the unprecedented transformation of our outer landscapes, our inner landscapes are also shifting in ways that demand our attention. Given at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London in November 2023, this talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks to the...
Jan 16, 2024•45 min
In this conversation, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Paul Salopek, who is a decade into a remarkable journey retracing, on foot , the migration pathway taken by the first humans out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago. Speaking to us from the Liaoning province in northeastern China, Paul shares how moving at three miles per hour has deepened his personal relationship to time. As he becomes attuned to what he terms "sacramental time," the boundaries betwee...
Jan 09, 2024•50 min
In an audio adaptation of our multimedia experience “Valemon the Bear: Myth in the Age of the Anthropocene,” mythologist Martin Shaw takes us on a journey to the deepest parts of ourselves. Summoning the ancient tale of a wild daughter falling in love with a bear, Martin invites us into a deep encounter with a living myth that gossips across species, drawing us back into call-and-response with the more-than-human world. Explore the multimedia experience. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more s...
Jan 02, 2024•15 min
In our final podcast of the year, a special selection of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry offers nourishment for heart and spirit. Twenty-five years ago, Buddhist scholar and eco-philosopher Joanna Macy collaborated with award-winning poet Anita Burrows to translate Rilke’s seminal collection of poetry, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God , which explores the nature of God through divinely received prayers. In this reading, excerpted from the album Be Earth Now , produced by Fletcher Tucker at Gnome...
Dec 19, 2023•23 min
Witnessing the cry of the Earth, in its myriad permutations, can evoke real responses of grief and deep love for the planet. As we begin to acknowledge the wounds we’ve inflicted upon our nonhuman kin, how can tender connections with a harmed Earth foster spaces of healing? In this week’s podcast, poet and author Camille T. Dungy reaches for the possibility of sanctuary amid pain and loss. Bearing witness to an encounter between a man and an injured elephant, her poem offers us the opportunity t...
Dec 12, 2023•5 min
In this short story, Booker Prize–winning Nigerian author and poet Ben Okri envisions the tragedy and peace of a post-human world. Twenty thousand years into the future, an exploration of Earth uncovers the final notes and unfinished stories left by the last human beings in the twilight of their civilization. Reflecting on humanity’s genius for extraction and domination, this uncanny tale, narrated by acclaimed British actor Colin Salmon, follows our trajectory into extinction and invites the qu...
Dec 05, 2023•57 min
Interrogating where AI models originate from and who they serve, writer, artist, and technologist James Bridle questions our fundamental assumptions about intelligence in this expansive interview. Acknowledging the correlation between our narrow definition of intelligence and what our technologies look like, they wonder how an embrace of the unknowable and the unpredictable in our technology might in fact allow us to widen our thinking beyond the humancentric and step deeper into the mystery and...
Nov 28, 2023•59 min
In one of our favorite stories, “Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System,” Potawatomi mother, scientist, and professor Robin Wall Kimmerer takes us through the nine-thousand-year existence of maize, reflecting on the ancient circle of reciprocity that links humans and corn and what has been severed in this once deeply sacred relationship. With an eye to the unsustainable industrial practices—GMOs, monoculture, use of toxic fertilizers—that continue to dominate the landscape of agriculture, Robin ...
Nov 21, 2023•58 min
In this narrated essay, Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s experiences of pregnancy and motherhood bring her into an emerging realization of her own mammalhood. When she encounters her animal self, deeply embedded in the ecosystems around her, it transforms everything: her sense of home and safety; what it means to feel, to act, to care through the ancient, feral knowledge of instinct. Listening for teachings from the Earth, Kerri feels her way through the anguish and tenderness of raising a child in a burn...
Nov 14, 2023•36 min
How do our inheritances shape our lives? In this week’s narrated essay, Afro-Taína author Jamie Figueroa brings her pen to the erased and fragmented pages of her family’s history, exploring writing as a tool of revelation and reclamation amid a legacy of assimilation into white colonialist culture. As she works to uncover the inherited wounds of her ancestors housed in her own bodily cells, she also reaches for a deeper remembering—writing her way into the landscapes and the cultural memories th...
Nov 07, 2023•51 min
This week, we share a short story by Mexican author Laia Jufresa, translated by Sophie Hughes, that imagines the chaos of a world ravaged and divided by climate change. In “Be Dammed,” thousands of climate refugees find themselves forming settlements on boats as they wait endlessly to cross a heavily guarded border in pursuit of safety. One woman, tasked with holding prayers for their salvation, negotiates the entanglement of faith and politics as she considers who, or what, truly has the power ...
Oct 31, 2023•33 min
What can we learn from imprints in the earth about the ancient presences that left them behind? Acclaimed author Anna Badkhen traces markers left in the earth from the near and distant past, from the buffalo wallows of North America to the treasure-hiding game sekretiki she played as a child, from the histories held in whale earwax to the map of our human becoming in the Bouri Peninsula of modern-day Ethiopia. Reading each of these imprints as a kind of porthole—a window into memory, with all th...
Oct 24, 2023•32 min
This week, we’ve adapted the interactive multimedia feature “They Carry Us With Them: The Great Tree Migration” for our podcast. Written by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, this story delves into changing patterns of tree migration in Maine, tracing the threats faced by black ash forests. As she follows two Wabanaki black ash basketmakers grappling with the arrival of an invasive beetle, Chelsea asks what is at stake as these forests struggle, change, and depart in their search for survival. Explore t...
Oct 17, 2023•50 min
In light of the intensifying climate crises we face today, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates examine the opposing narratives of survival embodied by two birds in perhaps the most abiding of all Flood myths—Noah’s Ark. Questioning the dove's familiar story of salvation for the few, they urge us to follow the raven into a new world of widened and inclusive refuge. Read this story. Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more st...
Oct 10, 2023•41 min
In this short story by Japanese author Masatsugu Ono, translated and narrated by Sam Malissa, a woman and her young son move to an abandoned seaside village along Japan’s eastern coast, where they’re met by the well-meaning attention of its curious last inhabitants and their wise old dog. As a typhoon rises from the sea, reality, memory, and illusion begin to collapse into one another—and the pair find themselves increasingly inseparable from the mysterious landscape. Read this essay on our webs...
Oct 03, 2023•50 min
In this week’s essay, Natalie Rose Richardson begins to experience a quality of attention that birdwatching can cultivate. Learning from Chicago historian Sherry Williams, who has piloted programs exploring the relationship between bird migration and the Great Migration, and J. Drew Lanham, an ornithologist and poet whose work engages confluences of race, place, and nature, Natalie follows a migration path from Chicago to South Carolina that brings the practice of birdwatching together with her ...
Sep 26, 2023•35 min
Visiting the Ross Ice Shelf across several seasons, Stephanie Kryzwonos interrogates the heroic narratives of male exploration and conquest—written almost entirely by white men—that gender the land through feminine tropes. Might these characterizations, borne of a colonizing hunger to conquer and subdue, say more about the culture they come from than about the land they describe? What would happen, Stephanie asks, if we moved beyond fantasies and savior complexes, and instead approached Antarcti...
Sep 19, 2023•40 min
In a world rapidly spiraling into climate turmoil, will we reorient to welcome migration not only as a right, but a necessary human adaptation? In this week’s essay, writer Tristan McConnell ventures across Turkana in northwest Kenya, home of the Great Rift Valley: a place where some of our earliest ancestors emerged millions of years ago before dispersing in waves first across , and then out of the continent. As he discovers how deeply human movement, landscape, and survival are entwined, he wo...
Sep 12, 2023•54 min
When we are both left with the fragments of a dying world and given glimpses of an emerging one; when there is so much beauty and destruction to be witnessed, how can we find our bearings? In this talk, given at Emergence ’s recent Shifting Landscapes retreat held at Sharpham Trust in Devon, England, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee offers a frame for how we might navigate our current moment of unprecedented transition and transformation. Speaking to what can take root when we truly open ourselves to grief,...
Sep 05, 2023•43 min
How do words shape our world? In this week’s narrated essay, writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder visits the wind-sculpted dunes of Nebraska’s Sandhills, considering the prophecies that collided across the American Great Plains in the nineteenth century. Tracing the histories of violence, conquest, and degradation that have played out there, Chelsea locates the points at which human and wilderness were separated. Wondering what words, what prophetic voices are needed to guide us out of an entrenched...
Aug 29, 2023•1 hr 18 min
How might our human systems work differently if they were adapted to receive input from the nonhuman creatures they involve and impact? In this week’s narrated essay, writer and ethicist Melanie Challenger considers what it would take to expand the democratic imagination to include and represent animal voices in the decisions that affect them. Advocating for a quieting of our own narratives so that we might recognize political signals from the behaviors of the vast community around us, she envis...
Aug 22, 2023•41 min
Histories are enduring presences. No matter how deeply they are buried, they remain . In this week’s narrated essay, author Lauret E. Savoy meditates on the history of the Chesapeake region and the vestiges of collision and rupture that continue to mark its physical and cultural terrains. Surfacing ancient geological movements alongside the deliberate construction of race in colonial America, she considers the entwinement of tectonic and human histories—the ancestral structures that remain in pl...
Aug 15, 2023•39 min
As rapid warming, pollution, habitat destruction, and insidious violence against other species speeds up the rate of extinction and edges ecosystems ever-closer to collapse, what voids are left in the tapestry of the living world? In this short story, novelist Lydia Millet imagines the plight of the last remaining Tasmanian tiger—a creature caught in the crosshairs of Australia’s settler narrative, eventually hunted to the point of extinction. As a man seeks the company of the tiger, housed in a...
Aug 08, 2023•26 min
In this audio experience by biologist and acclaimed author David George Haskell, we are invited to be attentive to the songs and stories that thrum in the air around us. Hearing three billion years of our planet’s sound evolution—a lineage of language—in the trills, hoops, barks, bugles, clicks, and pulses of the life around him, David shares the connection to both deep time and the more-than-human world that can be found when we tune in to the Earth’s orchestra. Made entirely of the tiny trembl...
Aug 01, 2023•42 min
In this story, Diné poet and author Jake Skeets honors the food traditions that have sustained his people since time immemorial. As he prepares to butcher a sheep for Kinaałda, a Diné puberty ceremony of family and song, Jake contemplates reclaiming culture and restoring the relationships between people and land, food and community. Summoning the experiences that have shaped his own kinship with food, he puts forth story as a pathway to food sovereignty, reminding us that “the beauty of the beyo...
Jun 27, 2023•31 min
“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 creativity, he lifts up liberation, reparations, and deep connection to ancestors and the living world. Read...
Jun 20, 2023•13 min
