Emergence Magazine Podcast

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/adchoices

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

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

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://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-church-forests-of-ethiopia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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

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

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

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 future.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 is no separate thing called us and no other separate thing called wilderness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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 about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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

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

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

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. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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

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