Emergence Magazine Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves – J. Drew Lanham Jun 20, 2023

Show notes

“Joy is our lives mattering, / Blackness respected.”

Juneteenth is a day to celebrate and defend freedom, equity, and belonging for Black Americans. In this stirring reading of his poem “Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves,” poet, birder, and naturalist J. Drew Lanham grounds his vision of racial justice in quiet moments of awe among the more-than-human. Embracing radical acts of joy and creativity, he lifts up liberation, reparations, and deep connection to ancestors and the living world.

Read this poem on our website.

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Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet – David Abram Jun 13, 2023

Show notes

In this week’s narrated essay, cultural ecologist and geophilosopher David Abram conjures the impossible movements of Alaskan salmon, sandhill cranes, and monarch butterflies on their annual migrations, marveling at the reciprocal interactions that guide these creatures across the wider body of the Earth. What if, David asks, we understood migration as emerging from a conversation—a spontaneous reciprocity—between migrating creatures and the environments they migrate within? How might we humans, whose senses have coevolved with the enfolding biosphere, begin to recognize ourselves, too, as expressions of the animate, breathing Earth?

Read this essay on our website.

Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume.

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Hidden Bayou – Nathaniel Rich. Jun 06, 2023

Show notes

“Did Nieux Swamp resemble the original deltaic marsh, before it had been ruined by sea level rise, shipping canals, and pipelines? Or had the Foundation’s engineers created an alien landscape?”

This week, acclaimed author Nathaniel Rich invites us to step into a short story that blurs the line between climate fiction and our emerging, engineered future. In “Hidden Bayou,” an actuary-turned-field-biologist follows an endangered bird through a man-made climate mitigation project funded by a multibillion dollar corporation. When a surprising encounter disrupts his duties, he is left to confront his own role in the eerie, manufactured landscape.

Read this climate fiction story on our website.

Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume.

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Becoming Water: Black Memory in Slavery’s Afterlives – Makshya Tolbert May 30, 2023

Show notes

As our physical and cultural landscapes transform around us, what memories remain held by water? What histories of pain and destruction, what hallowed moments are carried in its currents, taken into its body like shards of glass, and resurface to haunt us, to guide us? In this narrated essay from our archive, 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.

Read the essay online on our website: emergencemagazine.org

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Saguaro, Free of the Earth – Boyce Upholt May 23, 2023

Show notes

Imagine a world where the mountains and glaciers, trees and waterways and animals—everything comprising our living, breathing planet—had as much a right to exist, legally, as humans. In this narrated essay, author Boyce Upholt travels to meet with the O’odham peoples of the Sonoran Desert, who have long revered the Saguaro cactus as a being with personhood. As Saguaro are bulldozed to make way for a segment of the US-Mexico border wall through Organ Pipe Cactus National Park, existing legal protections for the cactus come up against human-centric and extractive attitudes towards the Earth. Talking with elders from the Tohono O’odham Nation who are acting on behalf of the rooted beings of the desert, Boyce wonders how our Earth might transform if we recognized the dignity of all life.

Read the essay: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/saguaro-free-of-the-earth/

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In the Shifting Embrace of the Ganga – Arati Kumar-Rao May 16, 2023

Show notes

Visiting West Bengal during monsoon season, writer and photographer Arati Kumar-Rao bears witness to all that is formed and all that is destroyed in the swell and retreat of the Ganga. Struck by the immense power of the ancient river—a deity alive and accessible, benevolent and merciless—she wonders how human activity will continue to both affect and be determined by the will of its waters. As the Ganga transforms the lay of the land, shifting modern-day political boundaries, agricultural settlements, and historical constraints on its movement, Arati considers the confluence of the sacred and the profane.

Read the essay: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/in-the-shifting-embrace-of-the-ganga/

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Dwelling on Earth – Jay Griffiths May 09, 2023

Show notes

Soil has been described as the skin of the living world—vital, reactive, fragile and thin. Like our own skin, soil contains and protects a living, interdependent ecosystem that breathes, digests, and is finite in its ability to revitalize itself when harmed. In this rich, compendious story from our archive, author Jay Griffiths offers a love letter and a prayer to soil, marveling at the creativity and capacity of earthworms, fungi, and the pioneering water bear, soil-dwelling creatures who enable all other life. Jay looks frankly at how heavily we tread upon the land, describing the myriad threats to the health of the Earth’s soil and inviting us to commune with soil from a place of reverence and gratitude. After all, she reminds us, soil is what turns the Earth’s barren rock into the riotous life we know.

Read the essay: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/dwelling-on-earth/

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The Inward Migration in Apocalyptic Times – Alexis Wright May 02, 2023

Show notes

With native ecosystems and Indigenous lifeways perpetually under threat, acclaimed Australian Aboriginal author Alexis Wright considers how her enduring culture has responded to ongoing destruction. She turns inward to the dwelling place of ancestral story, to a space where the sovereignty of mind and imagination carry forward systems of knowledge that ensure the survival of her people. Understanding the intrinsic link between resilience and stories that regenerate the world we live in, Alexis looks towards the future and calls upon storytellers to help usher in the creation of a new world.

Read the essay: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-inward-migration-in-apocalyptic-times/

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Another Kind of Time – a conversation with Jenny Odell Apr 25, 2023

Show notes

How we experience time is, ultimately, how we experience our lives. In this conversation with Jenny Odell, artist and author of Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, she describes the social and cultural ideas that underpin our sense of standardized, mechanized time, which has laid an abstract grid over the living world. What choices, what futures, might become possible, she asks, if we allowed ourselves to slip free of the grip of linear, predictable chronos time and be swept into dynamic, interruptive kairos time?

Read the transcript: https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/another-kind-of-time/

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The Nightingale's Song – a conversation with Sam Lee Apr 18, 2023

Show notes

To mark the beginning of England’s nightingale season, we revisit our conversation with acclaimed folk singer, conservationist, and song collector Sam Lee, who steps into the forest each spring to sing with these beloved birds. In this interview, Sam reflects on the ancient musical kinship between humans and nightingales—melodies shared and silences exchanged—and the parallels between folk music and birdsong that embody deep connection to place. Finding a re-enchantment with the Earth through his practice, Sam speaks of the great importance of listening, and, as Britain’s nightingale population declines, a hope that music might offer the bird a path back into cultural consciousness.

Read the transcript: https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/the-nightingales-song/

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