Emergence Magazine Podcast

Long, long ago—before there were trees, before there were flowers, before life existed outside of the churning oceans—mosses bravely ventured onto dry land. In this special Earth Week episode Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, takes a long view of life on Earth, exploring how mosses—ancient beings who transformed the world—can teach us strategies for persisting amid a changing climate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In honor of Earth Week we’re revisiting our conversation from last year with Dr. Suzanne Simard, the renowned scientist whose groundbreaking research, widely known as “the wood-wide web,” demonstrated how trees communicate and exchange resources through networks of mycorrhizal fungi within the soil. In this interview, Suzanne speaks about the urgent implications of our evolving understanding of the interdependent nature of forests for healing the rift between ourselves and the living world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At her home in Siliguri, India, writer and poet Sumana Roy collects the trunks, roots, and branches of fallen trees and affectionately places them in the rooms of her house—admiring their life even in death. In this narrated essay, Sumana and her nephew debate whether the dead trunks can be revived by the element of water and reflect on the continuance of all that has vanished from our sight.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, Boyce Upholt travels to the US-Mexico border, where the O’odham peoples have long revered the saguaro cactus as a being with personhood—a belief that is congruous with the recent rights-of-nature movement. As legal protections for the cactus come up against the push to build a wall through Organ Pipe Cactus National Park, Boyce meets with elders from the Tohono O’odham Nation who are acting on behalf of the rooted beings of the desert. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, Jori ventures out from her home in Dakar, Senegal, drawn to the wisdom and resiliency of Africa’s baobab trees: ancient arks of biodiversity that have migrated across the landscape, enduring for millennia. As many of the oldest trees have died and younger ones struggle to survive, Jori bears witness to these elders in a rapidly changing world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay for our ongoing series on migration, Anna Badkhen asks: When does a journey begin? As she encounters people traveling north of the Ethiopian capital who are looking for a means of escape, she considers failed migrations when the forces of climate catastrophe and colonial greed combine to trap the world’s most vulnerable populations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, environmental philosopher Melanie Challenger examines the belief in human exceptionalism that has devastated life on this planet, and wonders if our desire to outrun death is hindering our capacity to love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narration of his essay, birder and naturalist J. Drew Lanham imagines an exchange of letters between Henry David Thoreau and John James Audubon, two pillars of conservation: one who extended his love of nature to care for a fellow human, and one who did not. Through this discourse, Drew asks: In the ongoing response to racism, how might reckoning with history help us to widen our field of view and weave better futures?  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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narration of her essay, writer and poet Makshya Tolbert wades into the liminal, haunted space that exists between water and Black memory. As she navigates Black lineages of thinking and practice, she comes to the meeting place of past and present, life and death, slavery and freedom, and embarks on her own return to water.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In honor of the passing of Buddhist monk and Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, we republished his Ten Love Letters to the Earth, a series of meditations that engage us in intimate conversation with the living world. Here, Emergence Executive Editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee reads all ten letters for our podcast. Composed as a living dialogue, they are even more potent when recited. We invite you to read them aloud yourself, joining your voice to Thich Nhat Hanh's call to fall in love with the Earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Spanish missions, boarding schools, and ranching empires in California drove many Coast Miwok people from their ancestral land, targeting the erasure of their history and identity. This three-part 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. In Episode Three, Theresa Harlan continues her grassroots efforts to protect the last standing Coast Miwok structures on Tomales Bay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This three-part series is 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. In Episode Two we learn that the Coast Miwok culture predates the geological formation of the San Francisco Bay. In tracing thousands of years of Indigenous presence and history, all the way through the oppressive colonial systems that have become today's mainstream culture, this episode asks: Who gets to define history? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

In this essay Camille reflects on the journey of seeds, how much of what we plant in our gardens was brought to our soils during the slave trade, and the legacy of trauma and triumph that lies within our food. Planting food, she contends, even in contaminated soils, becomes both an acknowledgment of grief and a celebration of the beauty of growing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we are revisiting our interview with cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram where he discusses the animism, power, and potency of the living world. In our current moment of ecological and societal instability he calls on us to remember our inherent participation in the collective, embodied flesh of the Earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this essay, Fred Bahnson, author of Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith, offers a tribute to the preeminent nature writer Barry Lopez. Originally published in Notre Dame Magazine, we are republishing “An Unbroken Grace” to commemorate the first anniversary of Barry’s death. In 2018, Fred spent several days with Barry at his longtime home in Finn Rock, Oregon, along the McKenzie River. As he recalls the time that the two spent together beneath old growth Douglas firs, Fred reflects on the life of this great writer whose numinous encounters and lifelong adoration of mystery informed his practice of living in service to the power of story as a way to illuminate and heal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tristan McConnell is a writer who spent years working as a foreign correspondent in Nairobi. In this essay, Tristan ventures across the rugged landscape of Turkana in northwest Kenya, home of Kenya’s Rift Valley: the place where, millions of years ago, our first human ancestors emerged and then dispersed in waves out of the continent. Present-day Turkana is a place that continues to be defined by human migration. As Tristan meets with archaeologists, pastoralists, and activists, he considers the ways in which Turkana’s long story is still being written. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As we approach the longest night of the year, we invite you to find a few moments of quiet to tune in to this re-broadcast of recitations from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God. In his seminal collection of poems, the great twentieth-century poet explores the nature of—and his relationship to—God through divinely “received” prayers. Twenty-five years ago, Anita Barrows, an award-winning poet and translator, and Joanna Macy, a Buddhist scholar and eco-philosopher, collaborated to translate this collection. On the album Be Earth Now, produced by Fletcher Tucker at Gnome Life Records, Anita and Joanna recite a selection of these poems. Through their potent recitations, they bring the spirit of Rilke’s words fully into our time and remind us of the ever-urgent call to love the world into being. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amitav Ghosh is an Indian-born scholar, novelist, and nonfiction writer. His many books include The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, in which he explores our imaginative failure in an age of ecological crisis. In this interview, Amitav speaks about his newest book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, and how the widespread silencing of nonhuman voices is deeply entangled in capitalism and the geopolitical structures that sustain it. Storytellers, he says, must lead us in the necessary work of collective reimagining: decentering human narratives and re-centering stories of the land.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices