Emergence Magazine Podcast

In this in-depth interview, Rowen White 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. As we prepare to gather around our tables for Thanksgiving, we are re-sharing this conversation from 2019 as an invitation to honor and remember the embodied histories and relationships that are carried by the foods that nourish us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month we released a special multimedia feature exploring the migration of trees and what is at stake for both ecological and human communities as forests move. Following up from last week's story on black ash, staff writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder shares three tree migration vignettes: sugar maple, paper birch, and red spruce. Each offers a glimpse of just one aspect of tree migration: nourishment, forest succession, and industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month we released a special multimedia feature exploring the migration of trees and what is at stake for both ecological and human communities as forests move. This week we hear from staff writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder as she narrates her feature story, They Carry Us With Them, about the potential disappearance of the black ash tree from the state of Maine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As part of a new Emergence series, we’re publishing a selection of essays from Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations—a five-volume collection edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer. Diane Wilson is a writer, speaker, editor, and the Executive Director for the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance. She is the author of The Seed Keeper; Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past; and Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life. In this essay, Diane asks what it means to be a good relative to the land as she endeavors to restore balance between the native and invasive plants around her home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dara McAnulty is a teenage autistic author, naturalist, and conservationist from Northern Ireland. After several years of writing his blog, Naturalist Dara, he published his debut book, Diary of a Young Naturalist, when he was fourteen years old. The book won the 2020 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, and Book of the Year for the Narrative Non-fiction British Book Awards in 2021. In this interview, Dara, now seventeen, speaks about his book and his approach to living a life immersed in and guided by the living world. Wise beyond his years, Dara speaks about his identity as an autistic person, the solace and comfort he has always found in nature, the role of the artist in envisioning a different future, and the great necessity of staying rooted in joy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As part of a new Emergence series, we’re publishing a selection of essays from Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations—a five-volume collection edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer—including this poignant essay from Richard Powers. Richard is the author of twelve novels, including the newly released Bewilderment, and The Overstory, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. In this essay, as he reflects on whether there is a genetic basis for altruism, Richard arrives at story as the vehicle through which human beings can find kinship with other creatures—recognizing and remembering our shared narrative in the urgent drama of this moment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Catherine Bush is the author of five novels, including Blaze Island, Accusation, and Claire’s Head. She is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Guelph and divides her time between Toronto and the countryside of eastern Ontario. In this essay, Catherine tends to the understory in a time of mounting ecological loss. As invasive plants proliferate in a park near her childhood home in Toronto, she considers her family’s own history as transplanted immigrants and how acts of reciprocity and care for the land might unknit despair.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re featuring this episode from our Language Keepers podcast series in honor of Marie Wilcox, the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language and the creator of the first and only Wukchumni dictionary. On Saturday, September 25, 2021, Marie passed away at the age of 88. Marie was a remarkable woman who was deeply committed to her family, the Wukchumni language, and to the Native language revitalization movement. She worked tirelessly for years to ensure the survival of her language, an effort that will serve her family and community for generations to come.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jack Dash and Luke Swenson are the creators of Atascosa Borderlands, a visual storytelling project combining botanical survey, oral history, and documentary photography to explore the Atascosa Highlands: an ecological crossroads that straddles the US and Mexico border in the Sonoran Desert. This piece documents Jack and Luke’s recent visit to the Highlands, where ancient populations of silverleaf oak, saguaro, and sweet acacia grow with no sense that the land around them is divided. But as the border wall imposes a hard boundary, this island of biodiversity faces an increasingly fragmented future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian, specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. In this essay, Bathsheba accompanies a Gwitchin friend on a moose hunt north of the Arctic Circle, and witnesses patterns of contrasting stories manifested in the landscape: one of conquest and inattention seen in collapsing river banks and melting permafrost; and another of restraint, held in the quiet knowing of the moose.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we’re featuring a favorite interview from our archives: Emergence Executive Editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee’s conversation with the acclaimed British writer Robert Macfarlane. The two originally spoke in 2019, as part of our language-themed issue, in a conversation that explored the lyrical relationship between language and landscapes, and the consequence, responsibility, and the pleasure of naming the living world.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charles Foster is a writer, barrister, and traveler. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide and The Screaming Sky. In this essay, Charles considers his role as a writer seeking to experience and express communion with the more-than-human world, and begins to wonder if language can do anything other than constrain and tame the tangled wild. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Natalie Rose Richardson is a poet and writer who was born in New York City to a long line of border-crossers and proud people of blended heritage. In this essay, Natalie searches for her great-grandfather’s grave in a historically segregated cemetery and confronts the American notion of paradise as an ideology which imposes walls of separation onto the multilayered landscape—allowing some in and keeping others out.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

J. Drew Lanham is a birder, naturalist, and hunter-conservationist. He is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. In this powerful reading, Drew recites his poem Joy is the Justice we Give Ourselves, a celebration of the radical act of joy through lifting up liberation, reparations, justice, and deep connection to ancestors and the living world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen Lezak is a PhD Candidate in the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. His work focuses on the politics of climate change in the context of communities and landscapes in the North American Arctic. In this essay, Stephen explores the paradoxical human narratives that overlay the Arctic landscape—a frontier, a paradise, a marker of our destruction of the planet—as he bears witness to a place that is teetering in an uneasy balance between eternity and loss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the pandemic begins to ebb and we begin to emerge from a difficult and transformative year, we are taking a moment to pause as the warmth of summer and the cool shade of trees—here in the Northern Hemisphere—beckons to us. Kimberly Ruffin is a Certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide and author of Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions. As a companion to Kimberly’s past Emergence essay “Bodies of Evidence,” she created a guided practice of walking through the forest. For Kimberly, faith is a continuous exchange of belonging, an experience that’s palpable among trees.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gina Rae La Cerva is a geographer, environmental anthropologist, and the author of Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food. In this essay, Gina Rae revisits her grandfather’s recipes in order to trace the elements of her Sicilian heritage. Through legacies of wild food gathering and feasting, she seeks to embody the traditions that have brought her family joy and sustenance, even in times of grief, conquest, and migration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Hunt is a writer, journalist, and storyteller, and the author of Walking the Woods and the Water and Where the Wild Winds Are. In this essay, Nick ventures into the Forest of Dean, an ancient mixed woodland, where he searches for the unruly, twilight realm of the boar—a creature who brings him to the boundary between wildness and civilization, history and myth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Heather Swan is a poet, writer, and beekeeper. She is the author of Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field. In this essay, Heather travels to Columbia, where nearly fifty percent of the country’s 4,300 native species of orchid are endangered. As the Colombian people and landscape continue to recover from a half century of civil war, she meets one family who is pursuing restoration and resiliency by cultivating native orchids and returning them to the wild. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this interview, which weaves conversation, song, and the music of nightingales, folk singer Sam Lee speaks about the transformative experience of collaborating with nightingales, the stories of ancestors passed through folk music, and the space for communion that is opened with silence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices