Emergence Magazine Podcast

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 stories as they are released each week. Illustration by Martin Shaw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Life Records, Joanna and Anita recite some of these poems, reminding us of the ever-urgent call to love the world into being. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Cover artwork by Claire Collette. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 to step into a moment where past harm gives way to an expansive recognition of love. Read this poem. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Cover artwork by Studio Airport. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 question: When will we truly comprehend the future we have seeded? Read this story on our website. Find “Thylacine” and other “Short Stories of Apocalypse,” in our inaugural print fiction collection. Learn more about our current immersive exhibition in London. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES. Cover artwork by Studio Airport. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 intelligence of the living world. Read the transcript. Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 invites us to reconnect with the age-old teachings and kinships, held within plants, that are waiting to be remembered. Explore this feature. Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 burning and breaking—and beautiful—world. Read this essay. Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 that bring together pieces of her identity. Read this essay. Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 to change their circumstances. Read this short story. Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 the retellings and reinterpretations characteristic of our messy, continual search for meaning—Anna wonders what lineage of impressions we might leave for the future. Read this essay. Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 the multimedia feature. Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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 own layered history. In landscapes both new and familiar, she shows us what’s possible when we bear witness with eyes wide open. Read this essay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Antarctica as a living place with agency? Read this story. Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

 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 wonders what such a place might remind us about who we truly are, and have always been. Read this story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, love, and ultimately kinship with the living world, he urges us to step into the liminal—the space between worlds—to recognize an invitation into new ways of being. Read the transcript. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 dualism, she calls us to remember that we have always been intimately linked with the cycles of our ecosystems. Read this essay on our website. Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 envisions the revolutionary mechanisms which could make present the expressions of animals within our systems of power. Read this story on our website. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 plain sight and out of view. Read this essay on our website. Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices