Emergence Magazine Podcast

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 this series, Theresa Harlan chronicles the story of her family’s displacement from their homestead on a cove in Tomales Bay and shares her grassroots efforts to involve the wider community in protecting both the history and the future of this place. As she tells her family's story, Theresa makes a powerful claim: remembering and retelling inclusive histories has the power to create a more just future. In this series we ask: Who gets to define history? In what ways is it our responsibility to ensure that a shared history i

How can stories return us to what is essential as we navigate an uncertain future? In this conversation with Amitav Ghosh, author of The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, he calls on storytellers to lead us in the necessary work of collective reimagining—decentering human narratives and re-centering stories of the land. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Three: Roots.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do we root ourselves in times of isolation and disorientation? As birder and writer J. Drew Lanham encounters his backyard during the pandemic lockdown, he designates it as a newly sanctioned “wild-like refuge”—a place that is brimming with life as he notices the wildlife that inhabits the nearby faraway. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Three: Roots.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We begin Chapter Three with a story that explores language as a technology capable of transforming our lived realities. As a Native scholar and poet, Jake Skeets considers the necessary interrogation of colonial naming and narratives, and how the Indigenous application of writing as a technology can reshape our world as we move into an unknown future. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Three: Roots.” 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 community? When did the living Earth first start to sing? We invite you on a journey into deep time and deep sound that will open your ears and your imagination. If you enjoy this audio story, check out David’s new companion practice, Playful Listening, which invites you to immerse yourself in the sonic world around you. Available on the Emergence Magazine website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daegan Miller is the author of This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent. In this essay, Daegan visits the tree that marks the thousandth westward mile of the Transcontinental Railroad and considers how our historical landmarks have shifted in meaning, leaving us adrift and disoriented in the Anthropocene.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Around the world, trees are on the move. Last year we published a special multimedia story, told from the perspectives of four native tree species, that explores what is at stake for both ecological and human communities as forests migrate. In this re-release of “They Carry Us With Them,” Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder narrates the feature story, chronicling the possible disappearance of the black ash tree from the state of Maine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In our final installment on the theme of Ashes from Chapter Two of Living with the Unknown, we enter a fictional world dominated by the monotony and tireless momentum of greed. In this short story from Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason, time expands and collapses as an architect in Reykjavíik struggles against the soulless design of urban landscapes in the Anthropocene. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Two: Ashes.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Acclaimed poet Camille T. Dungy bears witness to an encounter between a man and an elephant. In an effort to make sense of a world in which so much has been lost, this poem offers us the opportunity to step into a moment where past harm gives way to an expansive recognition of love. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Two: Ashes.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, Daisy Hildyard, a scholar of the history of science, examines three stories of atrocity and considers how whiteness has inscribed itself onto the land through violence. In what ways, she asks, does human history blur into the nonhuman world and into the present moment? Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Two: Ashes.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, writer and journalist Anna Badkhen brings us into histories of imperial collapse. As we continue our exploration of the theme of Ashes and what it means to live in a moment of unraveling, she asks: How do we come to terms with the world we have made? How do we make space for hope and sanctuary? Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Two: Ashes.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month we move from Initiation into Ashes with five stories from Chapter Two. When so much has been stripped away, how do we bear witness to ruin? How do we continue to be present with that which remains? We begin with the sudden disappearance of the bogong moth in alpine Australia. As writer Rebecca Giggs traces the moths journey from superabundance to apocalypse, she considers how very small beings are often responsible for vast surges of life.  Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Two: Ashes.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, Cal Flyn observes new species of butterflies arriving in Scotland's Orkney Islands. As plants and animals migrate northwards on an unprecedented scale, she faces the haunting knowledge that some voices are rising as others fade away. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We invited Oscar-nominated composer Volker Bertelmann, also known as Hauschka, to create a unique companion to the stories in our third volume, Living with the Unknown. The resulting four-part score is a cinematic and introspective experience, and a compelling counterpart for the journey into the unknown.  When we first spoke to Volker about the issue’s themes—Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures—he said he felt like they were describing a life circle and the course of creativity. Deep crises and collapses, he said, are necessary steps in evolution. His score evokes this circle, taking the listener through the questions about transformation that we’re exploring in this issue—and more broadly as a magazine.  This week, we’re excited to share the soundtrack of Living with the Unknown. Sit back and enjoy this contemplative sonic experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amid the cacophony of a cicada emergence, our final narrated essay on the theme of Initiation follows a movement into new rhythms and patterns of becoming. While immersed in a unified chorus of insect voices, playwright and director Anisa George reflects on her departure from the Bahá’í faith and its promise of a new civilization, choosing instead to embark on her own path. Sounds provided by David Rothenberg. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter One: Initiation”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, as our journey into Initiation continues, Sufi teacher and author Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee invites us to cross a threshold. Witnessing how humanity is tearing apart the web of life, he calls us to return our awareness to a fully animate world and to the deep ecology of consciousness we once held. Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter One: Initiation.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this interview from our archive, Buddhist eco-philosopher and author Joanna Macy discusses her life and work. From her anti-nuclear activism in the late 1960s to her work with deep ecology, Joanna expresses the need to live within an ethic of care for the earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay from our archive, poet and essayist Lia Purpura considers the processes which transform bodies from one state to another and the beginnings that emerge from endings. When she encounters the decomposing body of a deer, she witnesses the forces of restoration at play and wonders what constitutes stories of “rightness.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Initiation, chapter one of Living with the Unknown, begins where all inquiries into the unknown begin: with myth. In this narrated essay, Martin Shaw provides a mythological framework for forging new paths, calling upon different intelligences, and committing acts of sacred transgression as we walk our questions into a troubled future. Over the coming months, we’ll continue to release narrated stories from Emergence, Volume 3, as we ask: What does living in an unfolding apocalyptic reality look like? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sam Lee is a Mercury Prize–nominated folk singer, a song collector, and the author of The Nightingale: Notes on a Songbird. We spoke with Sam last year in the midst of England’s nightingale season about the transformative experience of creating songs in collaboration with a songbird. As part of a new documentary series that will be released next year, we're heading to the UK to experience Sam singing with the nightingales firsthand. In the meantime, we are revisiting this special conversation: one filled with song, as well as the stories of ancestors that are passed through folk music and the space for communion that is opened with silence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices