Emergence Magazine Podcast

Latest Episodes:

This Is Not a Rehearsal – Hala Alyan May 05, 2020

Show notes

Self-quarantined and isolated in her apartment in Brooklyn, Hala Alyan is more aware than ever of humanity’s interdependence—suddenly exposed as a raw, pulsing nerve. With all of us inescapably together as we move through this pandemic, how, she asks, can we make room for grief, empathy, and hope? Hala is an award-winning Palestinian American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in numerous journals.

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I Am Not Your Peril – Lisa Lee Herrick May 01, 2020

Show notes

In the wake of COVID-19, Lisa Lee Herrick challenges the resurgence of dangerous historical frames of race and belonging.

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In the Ground of Our Unknowing – David Abram Apr 24, 2020

Show notes

Facing the paradoxes and ambiguities enmeshed with the COVID-19 pandemic, David Abram finds beauty in the midst of shuddering terror. As we’re isolated in this uncertain time, he writes, we can turn to the more-than-human world to empower our empathy for each other.

Read the essay on our site: https://emergencemagazine.org/story/our-unknowing/

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What Difference Does a Day Make? Earth Day at Fifty – Paul Elie Apr 20, 2020

Show notes

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 celebration of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day we invited Paul Elie to trace the literary history of the environmental movement from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment. Though the plight of the Earth has become a fixture of collective consciousness, he asks if we will live up to the promise of unified action on behalf of the Earth.

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Among the Trees – Carl Phillips Apr 07, 2020

Show notes

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 and cannot be known. Carl is the author of numerous books including Wild Is the Wind, Reconnaisance, Riding Westward, and The Rest of Love.

https://emergencemagazine.org/story/among-the-trees

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The Poet and the Palm Tree – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder Mar 31, 2020

Show notes

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 expansive palm tree gardens in the world. In this essay, staff writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder visits these lush nineteen acres, now home to more than 3,000 palm trees and more than 400 unique species. Merwin wrote poetry in the morning and spent his afternoons planting and tending to trees. His poems are living witness to the care he offered to this land.

https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-poet-and-the-palm-tree/

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Shaking the Viral Tree – a conversation with David Quammen Mar 25, 2020

Show notes

In this interview, science writer David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, speaks about the root causes underlying the current pandemic and explores the ways in which viruses are embedded in the same systems of ecology and evolutionary biology that we are. As we disrupt wild ecosystems and shake these viruses free, COVID-19 offers an opportunity to reimagine our relationship with the natural world.

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Woods Work – William Bryant Logan Mar 24, 2020

Show notes

After visiting a two-thousand-year-old Linden tree in England, William Bryant Logan explores the nearly forgotten practice of coppicing, or cutting back a tree to stimulate growth, and discovers a symbiotic relationship between humans and trees. William is the author of Sprout Lands, Oak, Air, and Dirt. He is a certified arborist and serves on the faculty of the New York Botanical Garden.

https://emergencemagazine.org/story/woods-work/

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One Hundred and Eleven Trees – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder Mar 17, 2020

Show notes

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 and ancient relationship between trees and women.

www.emergencemagazine.org/story/111-trees

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On Survival: the Dead, the Sapling, and the Ancients – Lauren E. Oakes Mar 10, 2020

Show notes

In this narrated essay, ecologist Lauren E. Oakes looks beyond the scientific lens of subject-object while studying the consequences of climate change on a dying community of yellow cedars in the Alaskan archipelago. Lauren is the author of In Search of the Canary Tree.

https://emergencemagazine.org/story/on-survival-the-dead-the-sapling-and-the-ancients/

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