Emergence Magazine Podcast

Latest Episodes:

The Church Forests of Ethiopia – Fred Bahnson Mar 03, 2020

Show notes

Nearly all of Ethiopia’s original trees have disappeared, but small pockets of old-growth forest still surround Ethiopia’s churches, living arks of biodiversity amongst the brown grazing fields. In this essay, Fred Bahnson travels to Ethiopia to gain a deeper understanding of how our fate is tied with the fate of trees. Fred teaches at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, where he directs the Food, Health, and Ecological Well-Being Program and the author of Soil and Sacrament.

https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-church-forests-of-ethiopia

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dead Wood – Nick Hunt Feb 25, 2020

Show notes

Nick Hunt visits Białowieża, Europe’s largest surviving primeval forest, where life and death transform into one another with vigorous entanglement. Here, he traces the history of the European forest, revealing an ongoing battle between light and shadow, clearing and woods. Nick is a writer, journalist, and the author of Where the Wild Winds Are and Walking the Woods and the Water.

https://emergencemagazine.org/story/dead-wood

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Felling Light – Amaud Jamaul Johnson Feb 18, 2020

Show notes

In this essay, Amaud Jamaul Johnson returns to his poem “The Maple Remains” for the centennial anniversary of the Red Summer of 1919. Through historical witnessing we see the deep ties between racial and arboreal scars. Amaud is an award-winning poet and the author of Darktown Follies and Red Summer.

https://emergencemagazine.org/story/felling-light/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eleven Ways of Smelling a Tree – David G. Haskell Feb 11, 2020

Show notes

In this multi-sensory essay, David George Haskell invites us into the unique, and sometimes surprising, aromas of eleven different species of trees. David is author of The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors and The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature.

https://emergencemagazine.org/story/eleven-ways/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kinship, Community, and Consciousness – a conversation with Richard Powers Feb 03, 2020

Show notes

In this extensive interview, Richard Powers discusses his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory and his intention to tell a story in which humans are not separate from the living world around them.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Time and Water – a conversation with Andri Snær Magnason Dec 10, 2019

Show notes

Andri Snær Magnason is an Icelandic writer and documentary filmmaker. In this interview, Andri discusses his new book On Time and Water and our relationship to time in an age of ecological crisis. With Iceland having lost its first large glacier, the Ok glacier, this past summer—Andri discusses the ways in which geological time is beginning to move at the speed of human time. In order to bring about a planetary paradigm shift, he says, we need new ways to see and imagine ourselves into the future.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A Radical Reimagining of the Novel with Richard Powers and Forrest Gander Nov 25, 2019

Show notes

In this vibrant conversation, poet and author Forrest Gander interviews Richard Powers about his acclaimed new novel The Overstory. Recorded during a live event co-presented by Emergence Magazine and Point Reyes Books, the two Pulitzer Prize-winning authors reflect on continuity, kinship, and proximity with the living world. Advocating a radical reimagining of the novel that moves away from the centering of human characters, Powers speaks of a new ethic that includes an understanding that there is no separate thing called us and no other separate thing called wilderness.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reseeding the Food System – Rowen White Nov 22, 2019

Show notes

RowenWhiteis a Seed Keeper from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and an activist for seed sovereignty. In this in-depth interview, Rowen 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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Pull of the Sky — Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Oct 24, 2019

Show notes

In this narrated essay from our first issue on Perspective, medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen examines the history of our attraction to see Earth from above. He wonders what an enlarged perspective might bring. Does it offer a deeper understanding of ourselves as Earthlings or is this attraction an indulgence in a dangerous fantasy that we might be free of the gravity, and complexity, of life on Earth. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is the author of Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman and Earth.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tending Soil — Emma Marris Oct 23, 2019

Show notes

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 our ancient kinship with soil than nutrient extraction. Emma is the author of Rambunctious Garden.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices