Emergence Magazine Podcast
Episodes
Living in the Bones – Bathsheba Demuth
21 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian, specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. In this essay, Bathsheba ...
Speaking the Anthropocene – a conversation with Robert Macfarlane
14 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This week we’re featuring a favorite interview from our archives: Emergence Executive Editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee’s conversation with the acclaime...
Against Nature Writing – Charles Foster
07 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Charles Foster is a writer, barrister, and traveler. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Specie...
Paradise Extended – Natalie Rose Richardson
27 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves – J. Drew Lanham
20 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Meltwater: A Timepiece for the Arctic – Stephen Lezak
13 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 cha...
A Forest Walk – a guided practice by Kimberly Ruffin
06 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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...
The Life Story of a Recipe – Gina Rae La Cerva
29 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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, G...
Return of the Foreigners – Nick Hunt
22 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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, Nic...
The Forest of Orchids – Heather Swan
15 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
The Nightingale's Song – a conversation with Sam Lee
08 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this interview, which weaves conversation, song, and the music of nightingales, folk singer Sam Lee speaks about the transformative experience of c...
Where the Horses Sing – Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
01 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee is a writer and Sufi teacher whose work focuses on spiritual responsibility in our present time of transition. His many books in...
We’re Gonna Carry That Weight a Long Time – David Farrier
25 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
David Farrier is the author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, a meditation on the Anthropocene and a search for the fossils that humans are ...
Turn Towards the Dark – Hala Alyan
18 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Hala Alyan is a clinical psychologist, poet, and author. In this essay she reluctantly steps into the realm of fear in order to reckon with a precario...
Ravens and Doves – Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates
11 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the face of present-day environmental catastrophe and social injustice, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates examine opposing narratives of surviv...
Finding the Mother Tree – a conversation with Suzanne Simard
04 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this in-depth interview, Dr. Suzanne Simard—the renowned scientist who discovered the “wood-wide web”—speaks about mother trees, kin recogn...
The Voices of Birds and the Language of Belonging – David G. Haskell
27 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
David G. Haskell is the author of “The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors” and “The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nat...
Sanctuaries of Silence
20 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In celebration of Earth Day, we are resharing the podcast adaptation of our award-winning virtual reality experience, Sanctuaries of Silence, an immer...
QIKIQTAĠRUK: Almost an Island – Lauren Oakes
13 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this essay, conservation scientist Lauren Oakes listens to three generations of an Iñupiat family in Kotzebue, Alaska, discuss the transformations...
Be Earth Now – Rainer Maria Rilke recited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
06 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Rainer Maria Rilke’s seminal collection of poetry, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, the great twentieth-century poet explores the nature of—...
River at the Heart of the World – Arati Kumar-Rao
30 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Arati Kumar-Rao ventures into a forested river gorge in the hidden land of Pemakö, which exists deep within the heart of the Tibetan Buddhist belief ...
On Time and Water – a conversation with Andri Snær Magnason
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Andri Snær Magnason is an Icelandic writer and documentary filmmaker. In this interview, Andri discusses his book On Time and Water and our relations...
The Stories I Haven’t Been Told – Jamie Figueroa
16 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this essay, Boricua author Jamie Figueroa brings her pen to the blank pages of her family’s history, exploring writing as a tool of revelation an...
Once I Took a Weeklong Walk in the Sahara – Anna Badkhen
09 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Anna Badkhen is a writer and essayist who has written about a dozen wars on three continents and has spent most of her life in the Global South. Her b...
Keeping the World in Being: Meditations on Longing – Fred Bahnson
02 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In pursuit of a contemplative inner life amid a world in upheaval, Fred Bahnson looks to the early desert monks for guidance on how to direct our gaze...
Thirteen to One: New Stories for an Age of Disaster – Marie Mutsuki Mockett
23 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Whenever an earthquake strikes Japan, the myth of the giant catfish Ōnamazu reminds people that the living world is full of complex meaning. In the f...
A Convergent Imagining – J. Drew Lanham
16 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rachel Carson had met? Imagining an exchange in the year 1964, as the civil rights and environmental movements ...
The Inward Migration in Apocalyptic Times – Alexis Wright
09 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As the world falters, threatening native ecosystems and Indigenous lifeways, acclaimed Australian Aboriginal author Alexis Wright turns inward to the ...
Unraveling the Stitches – Kalyanee Mam
02 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Born in Battambang, Cambodia, during the Khmer Rouge regime, Kalyanee Mam immigrated to the United States in 1981 with her family. In this narrated es...
The Druid Renaissance – Lucy Jones
26 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Even as the pandemic has isolated us from one another, it has also revealed new paths into deeper communion with and connection to the living world. F...
Illuminating Kirinyaga – Tristan McConnell
19 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this narrated essay, Tristan McConnell ventures into the shrinking mountain forests that surround Mount Kenya, home to medicinal plants, ancient tr...
The Coronavirus Pandemic and the Invisibility of Nature – Michael McCarthy
12 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Just as modern science is catching up to the ancient understanding of our deep emotional and physiological relationship to the living world, the twin ...
The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance – Robin Wall Kimmerer
22 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy....
Radical Dharma – a conversation with angel Kyodo williams
15 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this in-depth interview, Reverend angel Kyodo williams reflects on our widespread crisis of story, the failure of institutional religions to offer ...
The Meaning of Air – Boyce Upholt
08 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As a chemical plant in St. James Parish, Louisiana, threatens a majority Black community with toxic emissions, Boyce Upholt looks deeply at the nature...
The Memory Field – Jake Skeets
01 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this narrated essay, poet Jake Skeets enters into the memories he shares through touch and, in doing so, conjures a deep reverence for the spaces w...
Reseeding the Food System – an Interview with Rowen White
24 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Rowen White is a Seedkeeper from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and an activist for Indigenous seed sovereignty. In this in-depth interview origina...
Coyote Story – CMarie Fuhrman
17 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this narrated essay, CMarie Fuhrman encounters a coyote whose leg is caught in a trap in the southern Montana prairie. As she decides what to do, s...
Reindeer at the End of the World – Bathsheba Demuth
10 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this narrated essay, ecological historian Bathsheba Demuth travels across the easternmost edge of northern Russia—home to the Native Chukchi peop...
Fermentation as Metaphor – a conversation with Sandor Katz
03 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this interview, Sandor Katz discusses his new book, Fermentation as Metaphor. A world-renowned expert in fermented foods, Sandor considers the libe...
East to Eden – Roger Deakin with Robert Macfarlane
27 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
From the Yangtze Valley, to Neolithic Mesopotamia, to the orchards of Oxford, Roger Deakin sought to understand the origins of the domesticated apple....
My Mother’s Hands – Gina Rae La Cerva
20 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Gathering wild foods was once a practice of deep observation, carried out by women who knew the ways of wild medicine. In this narrated essay, Gina Ra...
Desire Paths – David Farrier
13 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The coronavirus has shrunk the scale of our individual worlds, setting us on an uncertain and increasingly narrow path. While in lockdown, David Farri...
Language Keepers, Episode 6: The Power of Revitalization
06 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
To conclude our six-part “Language Keepers” podcast series, we explore the rapid rate of language loss occurring around the world and hear from sp...
Language Keepers, Episode 5: Kawaiisu
29 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For many Indigenous communities, the effort to document and learn from as many last speakers as possible is a race against time. In Episode Five of ou...
Language Keepers, Episode 4: Wukchumni
22 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Episode Four of our “Language Keepers” podcast series brings us to the home of Marie Wilcox—the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language an...
Language Keepers, Episode 3: Karuk
15 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Episode Three of our “Language Keepers” podcast series explores efforts to revitalize the Karuk language, which is deeply tied to the Klamath Rive...
Language Keepers, Episode 2: Tolowa Dee-ni’
08 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Episode Two of our “Language Keepers” podcast series brings you to the redwood forests of Northern California, home to Loren Bommelyn, the sole re...
Language Keepers, Episode 1: Colonizing California
01 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Adapted from our award-winning multimedia story, “Language Keepers,” this six-part podcast series explores the struggle for Indigenous language su...
The Creatures of the World Have Not Been Chastened – Lia Purpura
25 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Lia Purpura is the author of nine collections of essays, poems, and translations, including It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful and All the Fierce Teth...
Negative Love — Daisy Hildyard
18 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Daisy Hildyard examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn our attention toward the space between things. She notes that these “negative spaces” ...
And Peace Shall Return — Ben Okri
11 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We commissioned four authors to approach the theme of apocalypse through fiction, from the perspectives of past, present, and future. Our fourth and f...
The Basilisk — Paul Kingsnorth
04 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We commissioned four authors to approach the theme of apocalypse through fiction, from the perspectives of past, present, and future. Our third instal...
The Ecology of Perception – David Abram
28 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this interview, cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram discusses the animism, power, and potency of the living world. In our current moment...
Ink — Sjón
21 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We commissioned four authors to approach the theme of apocalypse through fiction, from the perspectives of past, present, and future. Our second insta...
Thylacine — Lydia Millet
14 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As part of our planned Apocalypse issue, we had commissioned four authors to approach this theme through fiction from the perspectives of past, presen...
The Lord God Bird: Apocalyptic Prophecy & the Vanishing of Avifauna – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
07 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As the existence of the famed ivory-billed woodpecker is increasingly left to the realm of myth, Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder explores the widespread dis...
Sweet Breath from Another – Crystal Wilkinson
30 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Crystal Wilkinson is the author of The Birds of Opulence; Water Street; and Blackberries, Blackberries, and an Associate Professor of English in the C...
Courting the Wild Twin – Martin Shaw
26 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As part of our recent series of online conversations with our contributors, mythologist and storyteller Dr. Martin Shaw joined us to read from his new...
The Other House: Musings on the Diné Perspective of Time – Jake Skeets
23 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this narrated essay, poet Jake Skeets explores apocalypse, time, and futurity from a Diné perspective. While colonial frames foretell a final apoc...
Beginning with the End – Roy Scranton
16 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this narrated essay, Roy Scranton asks what we mean when we say “the world is ending.” Examining the nature of the narratives we tell ourselves...
And God Laughs – Amaud Jamaul Johnson
09 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Amaud Jamaul Johnson is the author of Darktown Follies, Red Summer, and Imperial Liquor. In this essay, Amaud explores the loneliness and fear that ar...
Pickled Limes – Kalyanee Mam
02 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
During the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, Kalyanee Mam’s mother nourished and sustained her family with umami soups, chicken rice, and fried noodle...
Life in the Time of Cholera: Lessons on a Pandemic – George Prochnik
26 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As sirens fill the streets of London, George Prochnik recalls a revolutionary poet’s account of the 1832 cholera pandemic that unfolded in Paris. Wh...
Sanctuaries of Silence
19 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Since lockdowns began, there has been an unprecedented reduction in human-created noise. Our movements have lessened, the circle of our existence is c...
Robin Wall Kimmerer in Conversation with Robert Macfarlane
12 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As part of our recent series of online offerings, the Emergence Magazine Book Club spent the month of April reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s celebrated...
This Is Not a Rehearsal – Hala Alyan
05 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Self-quarantined and isolated in her apartment in Brooklyn, Hala Alyan is more aware than ever of humanity’s interdependence—suddenly exposed as a...
I Am Not Your Peril – Lisa Lee Herrick
01 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the wake of COVID-19, Lisa Lee Herrick challenges the resurgence of dangerous historical frames of race and belonging. Learn more about your ad cho...
In the Ground of Our Unknowing – David Abram
24 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Facing the paradoxes and ambiguities enmeshed with the COVID-19 pandemic, David Abram finds beauty in the midst of shuddering terror. As we’re isola...
What Difference Does a Day Make? Earth Day at Fifty – Paul Elie
20 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Paul Elie is the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Reinventing Bach and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. As part of our celebra...
Among the Trees – Carl Phillips
07 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this extended meditation on the relationship between place and intimacy, the body and the word, Carl Phillips walks among trees to explore what can...
The Poet and the Palm Tree – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
31 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The poet W.S. Merwin spent the last four decades of his life on Maui, restoring a plot of abandoned land that would become one of the most diverse and...
Shaking the Viral Tree – a conversation with David Quammen
25 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this interview, science writer David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, speaks about the root causes unde...
Woods Work – William Bryant Logan
24 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
After visiting a two-thousand-year-old Linden tree in England, William Bryant Logan explores the nearly forgotten practice of coppicing, or cutting ba...
One Hundred and Eleven Trees – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
17 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 an...
On Survival: the Dead, the Sapling, and the Ancients – Lauren E. Oakes
10 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this narrated essay, ecologist Lauren E. Oakes looks beyond the scientific lens of subject-object while studying the consequences of climate change...
The Church Forests of Ethiopia – Fred Bahnson
03 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Nearly all of Ethiopia’s original trees have disappeared, but small pockets of old-growth forest still surround Ethiopia’s churches, living arks o...
Dead Wood – Nick Hunt
25 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Nick Hunt visits Białowieża, Europe’s largest surviving primeval forest, where life and death transform into one another with vigorous entanglemen...
Felling Light – Amaud Jamaul Johnson
18 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this essay, Amaud Jamaul Johnson returns to his poem “The Maple Remains” for the centennial anniversary of the Red Summer of 1919. Through hist...
Eleven Ways of Smelling a Tree – David G. Haskell
11 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this multi-sensory essay, David George Haskell invites us into the unique, and sometimes surprising, aromas of eleven different species of trees. D...
Kinship, Community, and Consciousness – a conversation with Richard Powers
03 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this extensive interview, Richard Powers discusses his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory and his intention to tell a story in which human...
On Time and Water – a conversation with Andri Snær Magnason
10 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Andri Snær Magnason is an Icelandic writer and documentary filmmaker. In this interview, Andri discusses his new book On Time and Water and our relat...
A Radical Reimagining of the Novel with Richard Powers and Forrest Gander
25 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In this vibrant conversation, poet and author Forrest Gander interviews Richard Powers about his acclaimed new novel The Overstory. Recorded during a ...
Reseeding the Food System – Rowen White
22 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 wha...
The Pull of the Sky — Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
24 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In this narrated essay from our first issue on Perspective, medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen examines the history of our attraction to see Earth from ...
Tending Soil — Emma Marris
23 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
The Seeds of Ancestors: A Day at Soul Fire Farm – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
23 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 reco...
Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts — Crystal Wilkinson
23 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 trad...
Dwelling on Earth — Jay Griffiths
23 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Marveling at worms, fungi, and the pioneering water bear, Jay Griffiths brings our attention to what dwells beneath our feet, inviting us to remember ...
We Learned to Fear Tiger and to Love Squirrel – Lisa Lee Herrick
23 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the storied universe of Hmong cosmology, Squirrel is revered for its ability to outsmart the hunter. In this narrated essay, Lisa Lee Herrick recal...
Fermenting Culture – David Zilber
23 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 cu...
Speaking the Anthropocene – Robert Macfarlane
21 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In this in-depth interview, writer Robert Macfarlane takes listeners on a journey through language and landscape, exploring how a precision of utteran...
The Language of the Master – Paul Kingsnorth
21 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 “...
Atlas with Shifting Edges – Elizabeth Rush
21 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Elizabeth Rush reflects on climate change as a transformational force on our landscapes and the words we might use to grasp this shifting reality. Her...
The Voices of Birds and the Language of Belonging – David G. Haskell
21 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
David Haskell enters the intricate and generative soundscape of the world of birds, inviting us to join in a practice of cross-species listening as a ...
On the Language of the Deep Blue – Charles Foster
21 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In an effort to seek out a language beyond the human, Charles Foster travels to the Isle of Skye to listen to the intricate vocalizations of the eight...
Losing Language – Camille T. Dungy
21 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Rejecting the refrain “there are no words,” author and poet Camille T. Dungy reaches for a language that can encompass the experience of lonelines...
A Forest Walk – Practice Guided by Kimberly Ruffin
22 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
As a companion to Kimberly Ruffin's essay “Bodies of Evidence” from our Faith issue, she created this guided practice offering ways to connect to ...
Ancient Root – Linda Hogan
15 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
For Chickasaw novelist and poet, Linda Hogan, hope lives where faith has fallen away. During an encounter with caged elephants, she experiences a wave...
Wave Patterns – Aylie Baker
26 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In this narrated essay, Aylie Baker reflects on her experiences sailing by canoe under Micronesian Master Navigator Sesario Sewralur and shows how we ...