Over the next month we'll be sharing four stories in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature. In this first one, author Sophie Strand uses her imagination to feel herself as part of the more-than-human world—as river, hummingbird, and mycelial network. Opening herself up to a “supracellular” state, she practices letting her mind leak beyond the bounds of individual consciousness and through the threads of relation that she shares with her ecosystem to experience being not a siloed self...
Jun 10, 2025•20 min
What does it mean to search for transcendence in a world going completely out of balance? From our archive, this interview with acclaimed author David James Duncan explores his epic novel Sun House , which follows an eclectic collection of characters as they each seek Truth and meaning, together forming an unintentional community in rural Montana. Talking about the ways a heart can be transformed by deep experiences of mystical transcendence, David shares the impetus behind the novel: to impart ...
Jun 03, 2025•1 hr 10 min
What if we listened to the complex clicks of whales and could understand their meanings? What would we hear and how might we respond? More-Than-Human (MOTH) Life Collective founder César Rodríguez-Garavito, artist and technologist James Bridle, and author Rebecca Giggs come together in this conversation with Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee to explore the ethical, legal, and relational implications of a new project using AI machine learning to translate the speech of sperm whales....
May 27, 2025•1 hr 6 min
In this conversation, acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane asks the ancient and urgent question: is a river alive? Understanding rivers to be presences, not resources, he immerses us in the ways they “irrigate our bodies, thoughts, songs, and stories,” and how we might recognize this within our imagination and ethics. He speaks about his latest book, and traces his journeys down the Río Los Cedros in Ecuador, the waterways of Chennai in India, and the Mutehekau Shipu in Nitassinan and how each bro...
May 20, 2025•1 hr 4 min
Writer Nicholas Triolo walks the length of the Rio Côa in central Portugal with a book by Christian mystic Thomas Merton in his pack. For Merton, the living world shimmered with a divine feminine presence, meaning all within it was worthy of our love. Along the winding landscape of the Côa, damaged by agriculture and home to endangered animals, Nicholas witnesses the messy, subversive nature of “rewilding.” And with Merton as his companion on the journey, he begins to feel a wild, relational div...
May 13, 2025•45 min
Nick Hunt traverses the spine of the Curonian Spit in the Baltic Sea, and learns how its sands—anchored by forest roots for millennia—began to move rapidly and swallow villages in the eighteenth century when woodlands and sacred groves were systematically clear-cut for timber. Though halted through engineering and reforestation, the dunes are now eroding under human footsteps, and spilling into the lagoon they border. As he witnesses how quickly landscapes are changed by our own hands, Nick asks...
May 06, 2025•37 min
English novelist Daisy Hildyard envisions the deep time evolution of the coastline of Scarborough, North Yorkshire: from a prehistoric meteor strike, to a 19th-century seaside aquarium devoid of fish, a present-day spate of dead tides, and a future where part of the human population has evolved into a hybrid marine species, drawn back to the cradle of the sea to care for its degraded waters. Vividly narrated by acclaimed British actor Colin Salmon, and created as part of Wild Eye—an art and natu...
Apr 29, 2025•29 min
In celebration of Earth Day, this episode invites you to offer your ears to the polyphony of sounds and silences that give the planet Her voice with two of our most cherished audio stories. “When the Earth Started to Sing,” by biologist David G. Haskell, combines human speech with more-than-human voices to immerse your senses in the connective power of sound across deep time. “Sanctuaries of Silence,” an adaptation of our virtual reality experience featuring acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, br...
Apr 22, 2025•1 hr 10 min
As humans, we long for stability, yet the Earth tells us in many languages—erosion, ice melt, the seasons—that all is fleeting in an endless cycle of creation and destruction. Grappling with her fear of change caused by wildfires in Montana and the long-overdue Cascadia earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, Erica Berry confronts how the colonial erasure of Indigenous stories of place and her own limited sense of time have blinded her to the Earth’s dramatic flux. As she learns that impermanence d...
Apr 15, 2025•25 min
In the tradition of telling the bees, beekeepers relay the news of a death in the family to each of their hives, oftentimes draping them in black mourning cloth. As bee colonies in the US perish in record numbers, Emily Polk wonders if bees not only witness human grief, but also feel loss themselves. Meeting with a famous Yemeni beekeeper in downtown Oakland, California, and scientists from around the world studying bee behavior and cognition, she learns of the enduring generosity and spirit of ...
Apr 08, 2025•29 min
On a field trip to Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador in 2022, mycologist Giuliana Furci, author Robert Macfarlane, legal scholar and More Than Human (MOTH) Life Collective founder César Rodríguez-Garavito, and musician Cosmo Sheldrake wrote and recorded “Song of the Cedars”—a composition made not just in the forest, but in conscious collaboration with it. Rich with field recordings of the ecosystem and the track’s entwined human and more-than-human melodies, this conversation between the fourso...
Apr 01, 2025•54 min
In this experiential essay, Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta breaks the constructs of linear time and storytelling with love magic—a connective substance that transcends time and space—and explores how we might slip between the cracks of the linear and maintain connection across time. Drawing on the knowledge encoded in a traditional boomerang he carved from silky oak, Tyson urges us to flow with love magic; to “swim in its currents” to offset the greed and extraction that is consuming the wo...
Mar 25, 2025•30 min
From the archive, this week’s episode is a conversation with author and artist Jenny Odell. Speaking about her book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, she challenges the social and cultural ideas that underpin standardized, mechanized time, and imagines how we might instead attune to the rhythms of the Earth and embrace interruptions that allow us to glimpse the inherent unpredictability and creativity of every moment. What choices, what futures, might become possible, she asks, i...
Mar 18, 2025•1 hr 3 min
What does a place, a community, look like when it welcomes home Indigenous presence? Recorded in January 2025, this new fourth episode of “Coming Home to the Cove” explores the impact of Theresa Harlan’s work to protect, restore, and rematriate Felix Cove over the last three years—from widening community awareness of Coast Miwok history; to opening hearts to allyship between Indigenous and settler families; and running traditional ecological knowledge workshops. Amid ongoing vandalism of her anc...
Mar 11, 2025•59 min
This audio 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. Episode Three examines the role Spanish missions, boarding schools, and ranching empires played in driving many Coast Miwok people from their ancestral lands; and follows Theresa Harlan and her relatives on a boat trip to Felix Cove to experience their mothers’ perspective of arriving at their home from the w...
Mar 04, 2025•1 hr 4 min
This series tells 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. Episode Two traces the Coast Miwok’s ten-plus-millennia-long presence in this landscape. Rich with interviews with a local historian and members of Theresa Harlan’s family, this episode asks: How is it that ten thousand years of continuous human civilization is...
Feb 25, 2025•1 hr 3 min
This series tells the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their ancestral home in Northern California, and one woman’s grassroots mission to restore their living history to the land. As we reshare this series over the coming weeks, we’re adding a new fourth episode tracing recent developments in Theresa Harlan’s work, its impact on the community, and the ongoing challenge of creating space for Indigenous history. In Episode One, Theresa Harlan shares the story of her ...
Feb 18, 2025•48 min
In this interview from the archive, Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta invites us into an Indigenous understanding of time as inseparable from place. He shares the ways Lore and knowledge are kept within lands and tribes over centuries, and how deep time thinking can help us feel our obligation to beings, landscapes, and future generations. With candor and humor, Tyson emphasizes the importance of story, data, and technology emerging from a place of “right relationship” if we are to usher in ne...
Feb 11, 2025•40 min
In this archive conversation, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard speaks about her life’s work exploring tree intelligence and relationships, and her most recent research on Mother Trees—the oldest trees in the forest—and their astounding ability to recognize and nourish their own kin. Stepping outside of scientific precepts towards a vernacular that acknowledges connection—“mother,” “children,” “grandfather”—she delves further into the intricate web of relationships that Western systems of knowledg...
Feb 04, 2025•1 hr 7 min
David Farrier examines how “wild clocks”—the biological and ecological rhythms that living beings use to coordinate their lives with the greater cycles of the Earth—are falling out of synch with each other in our age of ecological crisis. Traversing the Future Library in Norway, Sami reindeer herds in Scandinavia, and oyster colonies in Scotland’s Firth of Forth, David considers the different ways time is made between people, more-than-human beings, and place—and wonders if the disordering of ou...
Jan 28, 2025•41 min
Given at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London in November 2024, this final talk in a series by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee explores how an embodied practice of spiritual ecology is a radical act amid a culture that has forgotten the sacred nature of our relationship with the Earth. He shares how a remembrance of this intimate connection is the spiritual responsibility of our time, and that when our hearts recognize and hold this reality, we can keep alive an essential connecti...
Jan 21, 2025•58 min
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 fury of mechanized time that rampages through our urban centers. Throughout, he shares profound expe...
Jan 14, 2025•51 min
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 what is unknowable to envision how our technology could move away from the reductionism of ones and ze...
Jan 07, 2025•59 min
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 market economy. When we find the courage to honor the gifts given by the living world, the outcome, sh...
Dec 24, 2024•49 min
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 the stillness and silence of their interior worlds as a protest against the control of capitalistic t...
Dec 17, 2024•34 min
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 metaphysical river moving past, but an all-encompassing present that renders the Cosmos alive. An epilogue of...
Dec 10, 2024•16 min
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 growing awareness of more-than-human intelligence can upend the structures and hierarchies we have placed ...
Dec 03, 2024•52 min
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 how the ethical and pragmatic principles of the Honorable Harvest can invite us to honor a currency ...
Nov 26, 2024•1 hr
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 spruces and cedars, mosses and lichens, not as a site of slow decay, but of ongoing growth. How can bein...
Nov 19, 2024•34 min
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 of our planet. Celebrating the deep time- fulness of Earth—the four billion years of dynamism that ha...
Nov 12, 2024•34 min
