Emergence Magazine Podcast

In this third story we're sharing in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature, ecosystem ecologist Liam Heneghan turns to a council of philosophers and physicists to help reconcile the human experience of growth with the reality of decay as he keeps vigil by his father's bedside. He contemplates how closely life sits at the margins of death—one bleeding into the other—and wonders what can be learned from the everyday breakdown of leaves, milk, friendships, solar systems that might orient us to the nature of our own passage from life to death. As his father passes—elements dispersing into air and soil—Liam recognizes that all that flourishes must return to Earth; that in decay, something always endures.  Read the essay. Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The second in a series of stories we're sharing in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature, this narrated essay by Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta explores the ways we've long mistaken cerebral thinking for knowing, and in doing so, dulled a more vital intelligence. He argues that we are “overthinking and underfeeling” our existence, and reminds us that we have a second brain: the gut, which “governs terrestrial relations and is in constant communication with land and all our human and nonhuman kin.” Likening our intellect to lightning, Tyson shares how we must let it interact with the regenerative and relational “fire” of our bellies if we are to respond properly to the needs of land and cosmos.  Read the essay. Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the next month we'll be sharing four stories in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature. In this first one, author Sophie Strand uses her imagination to feel herself as part of the more-than-human world—as river, hummingbird, and mycelial network. Opening herself up to a “supracellular” state, she practices letting her mind leak beyond the bounds of individual consciousness and through the threads of relation that she shares with her ecosystem to experience being not a siloed self, but a web of interconnectivity. What empathy might take root and grow, she asks, when we practice thinking like this—when we imagine our consciousness to extend far beyond the confines of our own bodies? Read the essay. Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean to search for transcendence in a world going completely out of balance? From our archive, this interview with acclaimed author David James Duncan explores his epic novel Sun House, which follows an eclectic collection of characters as they each seek Truth and meaning, together forming an unintentional community in rural Montana. Talking about the ways a heart can be transformed by deep experiences of mystical transcendence, David shares the impetus behind the novel: to impart an experiential model of contemplative inner life that could help us navigate our ecological unraveling. He also speaks about the mystics, from Zen master Dōgen to the thirteenth-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, and what futures might become possible if we open our consciousness to love and the Divine.  Read the transcript. Photo by Chris La Tray. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if we listened to the complex clicks of whales and could understand their meanings? What would we hear and how might we respond? More-Than-Human (MOTH) Life Collective founder César Rodríguez-Garavito, artist and technologist James Bridle, and author Rebecca Giggs come together in this conversation with Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee to explore the ethical, legal, and relational implications of a new project using AI machine learning to translate the speech of sperm whales. Contemplating the human-centric linking of language with intelligence, the moral complexities of collecting and using these translations, and what it might mean to have an ear for “whale-ish,” they discuss whether a shared language is even needed to find a depth of kinship with whales. Read the transcript.  Image: Mike Korostelev / Moment via Getty Images Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this conversation, acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane asks the ancient and urgent question: is a river alive? Understanding rivers to be presences, not resources, he immerses us in the ways they “irrigate our bodies, thoughts, songs, and stories,” and how we might recognize this within our imagination and ethics. He speaks about his latest book, and traces his journeys down the Río Los Cedros in Ecuador, the waterways of Chennai in India, and the Mutehekau Shipu in Nitassinan and how each brought him to experience these water bodies as willful, spirited, and sacred beings. Read the transcript.  Photo by William Waterworth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Writer Nicholas Triolo walks the length of the Rio Côa in central Portugal with a book by Christian mystic Thomas Merton in his pack. For Merton, the living world shimmered with a divine feminine presence, meaning all within it was worthy of our love. Along the winding landscape of the Côa, damaged by agriculture and home to endangered animals, Nicholas witnesses the messy, subversive nature of “rewilding.” And with Merton as his companion on the journey, he begins to feel a wild, relational divinity in the land around him, and a devotion essential to rewilding place and self amid today's crises of despair and destruction.  Read the essay. Photo by Ricardo Ferreira / Courtesy of Rewilding Portugal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Hunt traverses the spine of the Curonian Spit in the Baltic Sea, and learns how its sands—anchored by forest roots for millennia—began to move rapidly and swallow villages in the eighteenth century when woodlands and sacred groves were systematically clear-cut for timber. Though halted through engineering and reforestation, the dunes are now eroding under human footsteps, and spilling into the lagoon they border. As he witnesses how quickly landscapes are changed by our own hands, Nick asks if the challenge is not in reversing the damage we've done, but in remembering humility before the forces of the Earth. Read the essay. Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

English novelist Daisy Hildyard envisions the deep time evolution of the coastline of Scarborough, North Yorkshire: from a prehistoric meteor strike, to a 19th-century seaside aquarium devoid of fish, a present-day spate of dead tides, and a future where part of the human population has evolved into a hybrid marine species, drawn back to the cradle of the sea to care for its degraded waters. Vividly narrated by acclaimed British actor Colin Salmon, and created as part of Wild Eye—an art and nature trail in Yorkshire that raises awareness about coastal erosion in the face of climate change—this short story traces the forever-shifting tides of our relationship with the sea.  Read the story. Illustration by Muhammad Fatchurofi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In celebration of Earth Day, this episode invites you to offer your ears to the polyphony of sounds and silences that give the planet Her voice with two of our most cherished audio stories. “When the Earth Started to Sing,” by biologist David G. Haskell, combines human speech with more-than-human voices to immerse your senses in the connective power of sound across deep time. “Sanctuaries of Silence,” an adaptation of our virtual reality experience featuring acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, brings you to the Hoh Rain Forest—one of the quietest places in North America—and guides you through the sounds that emerge in the absence of noise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As humans, we long for stability, yet the Earth tells us in many languages—erosion, ice melt, the seasons—that all is fleeting in an endless cycle of creation and destruction. Grappling with her fear of change caused by wildfires in Montana and the long-overdue Cascadia earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, Erica Berry confronts how the colonial erasure of Indigenous stories of place and her own limited sense of time have blinded her to the Earth's dramatic flux. As she learns that impermanence doesn't always signal loss, but rather the transformation of form, she finds a way to hold the fluctuation of the lands she loves. Read the essay. Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.  Photo by Zeb Andrews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the tradition of telling the bees, beekeepers relay the news of a death in the family to each of their hives, oftentimes draping them in black mourning cloth. As bee colonies in the US perish in record numbers, Emily Polk wonders if bees not only witness human grief, but also feel loss themselves. Meeting with a famous Yemeni beekeeper in downtown Oakland, California, and scientists from around the world studying bee behavior and cognition, she learns of the enduring generosity and spirit of survival of these tiny creatures, and glimpses the greater circles of loss that connect us with the more-than-human world. Read the essay. Photo: Wray Sinclair / Gallery Stock Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On a field trip to Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador in 2022, mycologist Giuliana Furci, author Robert Macfarlane, legal scholar and More Than Human (MOTH) Life Collective founder César Rodríguez-Garavito, and musician Cosmo Sheldrake wrote and recorded “Song of the Cedars”—a composition made not just in the forest, but in conscious collaboration with it. Rich with field recordings of the ecosystem and the track's entwined human and more-than-human melodies, this conversation between the foursome explores their ongoing effort to gain legal recognition of Los Cedros as co-creator of the song, which if successful, will be a world first.  Read the transcript. Photo by Robert Macfarlane. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this experiential essay, Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta breaks the constructs of linear time and storytelling with love magic—a connective substance that transcends time and space—and explores how we might slip between the cracks of the linear and maintain connection across time. Drawing on the knowledge encoded in a traditional boomerang he carved from silky oak, Tyson urges us to flow with love magic; to “swim in its currents” to offset the greed and extraction that is consuming the world.  Read the essay.  Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the archive, this week's episode is a conversation with author and artist Jenny Odell. Speaking about her book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, she challenges the social and cultural ideas that underpin standardized, mechanized time, and imagines how we might instead attune to the rhythms of the Earth and embrace interruptions that allow us to glimpse the inherent unpredictability and creativity of every moment. What choices, what futures, might become possible, she asks, if we stepped out of chronos time and towards a kairos time? Read the transcript.  Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.  Photo by Chani Bockwinkel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does a place, a community, look like when it welcomes home Indigenous presence? Recorded in January 2025, this new fourth episode of “Coming Home to the Cove” explores the impact of Theresa Harlan's work to protect, restore, and rematriate Felix Cove over the last three years—from widening community awareness of Coast Miwok history; to opening hearts to allyship between Indigenous and settler families; and running traditional ecological knowledge workshops. Amid ongoing vandalism of her ancestral home, rancher evictions, and new land management, Theresa continues to fight for a larger vision of healing, and asks, are we willing to come together to honor the entire story of a land? Photo courtesy of Hewitt Visuals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This audio series is the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family's eviction from their home and one woman's determination to bring the living history of her family back to the land. Episode Three examines the role Spanish missions, boarding schools, and ranching empires played in driving many Coast Miwok people from their ancestral lands; and follows Theresa Harlan and her relatives on a boat trip to Felix Cove to experience their mothers' perspective of arriving at their home from the water. Next episode, we'll be sharing a new fourth installment to the series, tracing the impact of Theresa's vision to restore and protect Felix Cove over the last three years, and the ongoing challenges of creating space for Indigenous history.   Originally released on February 8, 2022. Photo by Jocelyn Knight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This series tells the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family's eviction from their ancestral home on a cove in Tomales Bay in Northern California, and one woman's effort to bring the living history of her family back to the land. Episode Two traces the Coast Miwok's ten-plus-millennia-long presence in this landscape. Rich with interviews with a local historian and members of Theresa Harlan's family, this episode asks: How is it that ten thousand years of continuous human civilization is seemingly invisible today? And who gets to define history? Photo courtesy of Theresa Harlan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This series tells the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family's eviction from their ancestral home in Northern California, and one woman's grassroots mission to restore their living history to the land. As we reshare this series over the coming weeks, we're adding a new fourth episode tracing recent developments in Theresa Harlan's work, its impact on the community, and the ongoing challenge of creating space for Indigenous history. In Episode One, Theresa Harlan shares the story of her family's uprooting from Tomales Bay, which ended their time there but did not sever their connection to the ancestral lands and waters of Tamal-liwa. Photo courtesy of Theresa Harlan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this interview from the archive, Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta invites us into an Indigenous understanding of time as inseparable from place. He shares the ways Lore and knowledge are kept within lands and tribes over centuries, and how deep time thinking can help us feel our obligation to beings, landscapes, and future generations. With candor and humor, Tyson emphasizes the importance of story, data, and technology emerging from a place of “right relationship” if we are to usher in new systems of order amid the chaos of the current moment.  Read the transcript.  Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this archive conversation, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard speaks about her life's work exploring tree intelligence and relationships, and her most recent research on Mother Trees—the oldest trees in the forest—and their astounding ability to recognize and nourish their own kin. Stepping outside of scientific precepts towards a vernacular that acknowledges connection—“mother,” “children,” “grandfather”—she delves further into the intricate web of relationships that Western systems of knowledge are only beginning to understand, and wonders what lessons these trees can teach us about healing our separation from the Earth.  Read the transcript. Photo by Diana Markosian. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Farrier examines how “wild clocks”—the biological and ecological rhythms that living beings use to coordinate their lives with the greater cycles of the Earth—are falling out of synch with each other in our age of ecological crisis. Traversing the Future Library in Norway, Sami reindeer herds in Scandinavia, and oyster colonies in Scotland's Firth of Forth, David considers the different ways time is made between people, more-than-human beings, and place—and wonders if the disordering of our wild clocks offers an opportunity to understand anew how time can be an expression of kinship. Read the essay.  Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.  Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Given at St. Ethelburga's Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London in November 2024, this final talk in a series by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee explores how an embodied practice of spiritual ecology is a radical act amid a culture that has forgotten the sacred nature of our relationship with the Earth. He shares how a remembrance of this intimate connection is the spiritual responsibility of our time, and that when our hearts recognize and hold this reality, we can keep alive an essential connection and offer a practice of love to the suffering Earth.  Read the transcript. Photo by Fee-Gloria Grönemeyer / Connected Archives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, we return to our interview with journalist Paul Salopek, who, for the last decade, has been on an epic journey retracing the migration pathway of some of the earliest humans out of Africa's Rift Valley. Moving through the world as our ancestors did, Paul shares how he's become attuned to the way time passes through us and around us: from the ancient pulse of the Earth underfoot, to the fury of mechanized time that rampages through our urban centers. Throughout, he shares profound experiences of timelessness, which he dubs “sacramental time,” that bring together mind, body, and landscape in conversation. Read the transcript. Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. Photo by Paul Salopek, National Geographic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this expansive conversation from our archive, writer, artist, and technologist James Bridle looks at how the glorification of our own intelligence has shaped the history of technology, and anticipates in our future an “ecological turn” in the way we view and create it. James draws on principles of decentralized knowledge systems, a redistribution of agency among all beings, and an embrace of what is unknowable to envision how our technology could move away from the reductionism of ones and zeros and towards reflecting other kinds of intelligence and the ways we are intimately connected to the world.  Read the transcript. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we return to one of our most cherished stories: “The Serviceberry,” by Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer. Exploring how we can move away from an economy of scarcity to one rooted in relationship and gratitude, she draws our attention to the gift economies flourishing all around us to affirm that it is entirely within our power to create webs of interdependence outside the market economy. When we find the courage to honor the gifts given by the living world, the outcome, she says, is not only material, but spiritual.  Read the essay.  Read the transcript for “Practical Reverence,” our interview with Robin on her latest book, which was inspired by this essay. Artwork by Studio Airport. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a countermelody to the media's persistent portrayal of Black bodies as working tirelessly, in constant motion, poet Roger Reeves centers images of Black men in postures of rest and repose. Evoking Muhammad Ali slumbering in a four-poster bed, John Coltrane washing dishes within the four walls of his house, DMX watering orchids, and Mike Tyson caring for his flock of pigeons, Roger reflects on the stillness and silence of their interior worlds as a protest against the control of capitalistic time.  Read the essay. Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. Photo by Gordon Parks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay and six-poem sequence, acclaimed translator and poet David Hinton finds an uncannily literal translation of modern science's “space-time” in yü chou—one of ancient China's most foundational cosmological concepts. He invites us to contemplate the fabric of time and space as a kind of primordial breath, drawing on the ideograms for yü chou to show that time is not a metaphysical river moving past, but an all-encompassing present that renders the Cosmos alive. An epilogue of poems delivers us into an elemental world where time is woven with the sacred.  Read the essay and poems.  Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, climate journalist Zoë Schlanger speaks about her book The Light Eaters and explores what it might mean if we embraced plant intelligence within the frame of Western science. She shares a smorgasbord of new findings around the capabilities of plants—from roots that can sense the sound of running water to flowers memorizing the timing of pollinators' visits—and wonders how a growing awareness of more-than-human intelligence can upend the structures and hierarchies we have placed around living beings, ourselves included. Talking about the politics of language in the field of botany, shedding her own plant blindness, and how we can widen our scientific imaginations to perceive intelligence in beings without brains, Zoë probes what it will take for us to let plants into the realm of our ethical consideration.  Read the transcript.  Photo by Yael Malka. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this conversation, Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer celebrates the serviceberry—both as a plant of joyous generosity, and as a living model for a gift economy that recognizes the sacred nature of the Earth. Delving into her latest book, which elaborates on an essay she wrote for us in 2020, Robin speaks about how a sense of “enoughness” can radically shift our habits of consumption; and how the ethical and pragmatic principles of the Honorable Harvest can invite us to honor a currency of relationship over a currency of money, helping us embody a practical reverence for the Earth and Her abundance.  Read the transcript.  Read Robin's essay from 2020, “The Serviceberry.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, writer Robert Moor journeys to Haida Gwaii, an island chain in British Columbia, for the anniversary of a historic agreement between the Haida Nation and the Canadian government that protects the landscape's last remaining old-growth forests after decades of logging. As he walks through forest stewarded for generations by Haida, Robert begins to see the tangle of Sitka spruces and cedars, mosses and lichens, not as a site of slow decay, but of ongoing growth. How can being in the presence of ancient trees, he asks, help us feel, rather than intellectualize, not only the deep past, but also our responsibility to the future?  Read the essay. Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. Artwork by Maurits Wouters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Earth has a story that far precedes ours. Before we arrived on the scene, the Earth was already ancient beyond belief, shaped and reshaped by tectonic upheavals, climate changes, and mass extinctions—an evolution She has meticulously archived in the strata and sediment beneath our feet. In this narrated essay, author and geologist Marcia Bjornerud orients us to read these many-volume memoirs of our planet. Celebrating the deep time-fulness of Earth—the four billion years of dynamism that have made this moment possible—she wonders what might happen to our understanding of the past and the present if we remembered the stories that came before our humancentric one.  Read the essay.  Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our inner and outer worlds, while constantly changing, feed into each other, mirror each other, and both carry an imprint of what is eternal. In this narrated essay, author and Sufi mystic Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee shows us how the sacred dimension of time, where the linear is absent, can lead us inwards to silence and emptiness; and outwards, towards a pure sensory awareness of the sights, sounds, and rhythms of the Earth. Sharing that time and timelessness “are not separate but part of a living structure that includes a mayfly that lives for a day and a thousand-year-old sequoia,” Llewellyn calls us to regain a relationship with time beyond numbers and schedules; to remember that time belongs to the deeper patterns of life. Read the essay.  Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. Artwork by Laura Dutton. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jane Hirshfield's poetry is both mystical and deeply rooted in physical life, opening our eyes and hearts to what lies at the periphery—what is both ordinary and invisible amid the clamor of modern life—and reorienting us to engage from a space of wonder. In this expansive conversation, Jane recites several of her poems, including Time Thinks of Time, from our fifth print edition. Drawing on a lifelong relationship with Zen, she speaks about how a profoundly felt intimacy between self and world can recalibrate our ethics, helping us find both humility and an inner spaciousness that can lead us towards being in service to the Earth.  Read the transcript. Read Jane's poem Time Thinks of Time.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This third and final talk from a series by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee weaves together ideas from the previous two, exploring how time and place, love and kinship, the cycles and rhythms of creation, all flow in concert as an expression of the Earth. Offering a way to understand Earth Time through the principles and practices of spiritual ecology, Emmanuel speaks to how we might let go of mechanized time by connecting our inner and outer senses with the cycles that live and spin around and within us. When we reorient ourselves to be in relationship with the essential rhythms of life, we can come to know time as an animate, alive, and sacred expression of the love that runs through all things.  Read the transcript  Find out more about our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. Credit: Photo by Alecio Ferrari / Connected Archives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Through the concept of “space-time” we can understand how the movement of time is fused with physical space into a continuum. But what are the nuances of this relationship, in which time imprints place with meaning, and vice versa? This week's podcast is the second of three talks given at our Remembering Earth Time retreat earlier this year in Devon, England. Picking up the thread laid out in the previous talk on working with the love that runs through time, Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks about how the intimate relationship between time and place, expressed through the cycles ever-present in our landscapes, can help us form ties of kinship with the Earth. When time becomes rooted rather than abstract, he says, we can once again find ourselves a participant in the mystery and magic of creation.  Read the transcript.   Find out more about our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.  Photo by Carl Ander / Connected Archives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alongside our online release of stories from Volume 5: Time, a series of talks given by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee at an April retreat in Devon, England, brings together many of the themes explored in the print edition. This first talk offers a way to re-attune our sense of time to be in relationship with the cycles of the Earth—from the deep time movement of mountains, to the fleeting bloom and decay of cherry blossom. While we have stripped time down to a single expression, forgetting the axis of love that runs through it, Emmanuel speaks to how inner cycles of breath and heartbeat can return us to a more expansive story of time in which spirit and matter are once again braided together.  Read the transcript.   Find out more about our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.   Photo by Dennis Eichmann / Connected Archives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alongside our online release of stories from Volume 5: Time, a series of talks given by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee at an April retreat in Devon, England, brings together many of the themes explored in the print edition. This first talk offers a way to re-attune our sense of time to be in relationship with the cycles of the Earth—from the deep time movement of mountains, to the fleeting bloom and decay of cherry blossom. While we have stripped time down to a single expression, forgetting the axis of love that runs through it, Emmanuel speaks to how inner cycles of breath and heartbeat can return us to a more expansive story of time in which spirit and matter are once again braided together.  Read the transcript.   Find out more about our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.  Photo by Dennis Eichmann / Connected Archives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Released this week, the final film in our Shifting Landscapes documentary film series, Taste of the Land, tells the story of Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam's search for a spiritual relationship with her homeland. In this companion essay by Kalyanee, she delves deeper into her experiences of cheate—the Khmer word for “taste”—and how she came to understand that to truly know the essence of the land, one must know its taste. Tracing her life back to its very beginnings, she shares her first “land-taste”—the sweet flavor of Battambang oranges—and the many tastes that came after that slowly deepened the yearning in her heart to truly know the soils, waters, mountains, people, and plants of Cambodia. As she reflects on the spiritual fallout of her family's severed relationship with their homeland, she also contemplates the essential connection that was kept alive through stories, language, and food shared by her parents.  Read the essay  Watch the feature film Taste of the Land, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the fourth in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series. Photo by Jeremy Seifert. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his book The Nutmeg's Curse, scholar Amitav Ghosh writes, “the planet will never come alive for you unless your songs and stories give life to all the beings seen and unseen that inhabit a living Earth,”—seeding a shift in consciousness begins with the stories we tell. In this wide-ranging interview from our archives, Amitav explores the themes of his recent work, including the insidious philosophy that the Earth is inert and how this belief paved the way for the implementation of violent projects around the globe, such as the genocide of Indigenous people and the monolith of capitalism. Unpacking the rise and legacy of an ideology of mastery, Amitav asks, if such conquests were made possible by the narrative of an inanimate Earth, what stories can now be imagined to help us recognize the world as sacred and alive?  Read the transcript Photo by Sumit Dayal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can we learn to be with the grief that arises within as we witness the destruction being wrought upon the Earth? When we are broken open by the pain of loss, how can we hold and work with the seeds of despair, but also love, that flood into that space? This week, we revisit “Thylacine,” a short story by American novelist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet that imagines the twilight of the last remaining Tasmanian tiger, a creature caught in the crosshairs of Australia's violent colonization. As a man mourns the death of his mother, he seeks the company of the tiger housed in a failing zoo. Turning to face the loss that begins to swell through the zoo like a plague, he summons the courage to care for what remains amid an overwhelming sorrow for what will inevitably disappear. Read the story  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In December last year, Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam's short film Lost World screened at our Shifting Landscapes exhibition in London. Kalyanee's films tenderly document the changing cultural and ecological landscapes of her homeland, and in Lost World she shares the story of a community in Koh Sralau whose livelihoods are threatened as the mangrove forests they depend on are ruthlessly mined for sand to build an “eco-park” in Singapore. In this conversation, recorded live at the exhibition, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks with Kalyanee about her years-long process of creating the film, and the intimate relationships she holds with people and land that allow her to tell powerful, and often heartbreaking, stories of changing landscapes from a place of humility and connection.  Read the transcript  Watch Kalyanee's short film Lost World and read her companion essay Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This talk was a keynote given by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee during a conference on spiritual ecology and peace building at St. Ethelburga's Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in July. It explores how spiritual ecology is fundamentally a memory of living in kinship with the Earth that must be reawakened if we are to embody a spiritual connection with the living world. Turning to praise and prayer, and the many forms they take, as ways to return to this sacred relationship, Emmanuel calls us to sweep the dust of our forgetfulness and hold the Earth in our hearts with love Read the transcript. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This short story, written by Andri Snær Magnason for our third print edition, follows an architect in Reykjavík grappling with the growing discord between his creativity and a capitalist reality. Laying bare the ways narratives of control and human supremacy can manifest in the physical objects we make, “Giantstone” asks us to consider what new stories could begin to shape our inner and outer worlds. Will we remain stuck in our humancentric philosophies, or will our art come to reflect a way of life that keeps and cares for the Earth? Read the short story. Watch the film The Last Ice Age, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the third in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series. Illustration by Juan Bernabeu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The warming of the planet is ushering in changes on a mythological scale. Oceans heat up, ice shelves melt, great floods swallow landscapes, ancient forests are reduced to ash. In this interview from our archive, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason speaks about how such incomprehensible changes are accelerating geological timescales. Instead of playing out over millennia, vast transformations of the Earth are now happening in the span of a lifetime, and in rapid succession. An accompaniment to The Last Ice Age—the third film in our Shifting Landscapes film series—this conversation with Andri explores how we can shift our sense of time to comprehend an uncertain future with greater clarity. Drawing on poetry, memories, stories from his grandparents, and language that infuses meaning into the data-led narrative of the climate crisis, Andri turns to the power of mythology to help us comprehend both the loss and possibility of our moment. Read the transcript. Watch the film The Last Ice Age, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the third in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series. Photo by Gassi Olafsson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ChatGPT has divided opinion on how artificial intelligence might shape our future: Is it a harbinger of our demise? Or a friend, arrived just in time to guide us through our collective unraveling? As we entangle ourselves with this technology, are there ways we can use it to transform our intelligence, rather than simply replicating it? In this week's essay, writer and adaptive leadership trainer Dana Karout pokes fun at the ways ChatGPT mirrors our own limited ways of thinking. Drawing on her work helping communities navigate conflict and complexity, she pushes us to resist regurgitating what we already know in situations that demand new ways of being. As we try to address the existential challenges mounting around the world—ecological, social, spiritual—could ChatGPT's empty spiels help us let go of our certainties? What true creativity, what real responses to our moment of crisis, might emerge from our unknowing? Read the essay. Illustration by Vartika Sharma. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last week we released Aloha ‘Āina, the second film in our Shifting Landscapes documentary film series, which tells the story of how acclaimed Native Hawaiian poet Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio brought her poetry and love of the land to the forefront of the movement to protect the sacred Mauna Kea from the construction of a thirty-meter telescope. To complement the film, we're returning to an investigative story we published several years ago when moves to begin construction first ignited protest at the foot of the mountain. Written by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, this story—rich with the voices and chants of Mauna Kea land protectors—traces the collision of values that continues to play out on the mountain, giving a depth of context to the promise of guardianship maintained by the Kanaka Maoli community. Read the transcript. Watch the film Aloha ‘Āina, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the first in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series. Photo by Kapulei Flores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Although the ecological sphere has long declared the need for a shift in consciousness if we are to survive the myriad crises we've ignited, this conversation often lacks examples of what this change in consciousness might be like as a lived, embodied experience. This week, author of the cult classics The Brothers K and The River Why, David James Duncan, joins the podcast to speak about his new epic novel, Sun House—a story following the journeys of an eclectic collection of characters, each seeking Truth and meaning, who come together to form an unintentional community in rural Montana. David talks about the impetus behind the novel to impart an experiential model of contemplative inner life that might help navigate a future of social, cultural, and ecological unraveling that looms large. Wide-ranging and tender, the conversation explores how the wisdom of the great mystics—from Zen master Dōgen to the thirteenth-century Christian theologian Meister Eckhart and the Beguines—can be relevant in uncovering responses to the crises we face. Read the transcript. Photo by Chris La Tray. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month we released the first film in our new four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series exploring the role of art and the storyteller in our age of ecological crisis. The inspiration for The Nightingales Song, which spends time with British folk singer Sam Lee during nightingale season as he joins the bird in mutual song, grew from a special interview we held with Sam in 2021. To accompany the film, we're returning to this conversation with Sam, where he shares the story of how the call of the nightingale opened him to a kinship with the more-than-human. Reflecting on how this bird has served as a “wisdom keeper” and “unlocker” of hearts for generations of poets, musicians, and storytellers, he also speaks more about his process of leading audiences into this magical space of communion with the nightingale each spring. Read the transcript. Watch the film The Nightingale's Song, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the first in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series. Photo by Dominick Tyler. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this conversation, held in May at the Architectural Association in London, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee and architect, artist, and journalist Marko Milovanovic talk about Time, our fifth annual print edition, and our exploration of the mystery that lies beyond our humancentric notions of Time. Ranging from the kinds of time that can bring us back into relationship with the living world, to the mystical Sufi poet Rumi, and the impulses shaping our print editions, this talk explores the vision behind Emergence to help reweave the worlds of ecology, culture, and spirituality, and once again understand the Earth is alive, animate, and sacred. Read the transcript. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this conversation from our Shifting Landscapes exhibition, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is joined by Marshmallow Laser Feast creative director Ersin Han Ersin, one of the artists behind the exhibition's large-scale installation, Breathing with the Forest, which invites you into an experience of exchanging breath with a forest in the Colombian Amazon. Talking about the ways MLF's projects bring together science and imagination to illuminate the hidden connections within the living world, Ersin speaks to the power of sensory engagement, wonder, and awe to broaden our perception of more-than-human experiences. Explore our special online adaptation of Breathing with the Forest. Read the transcript. Image courtesy of Marshmallow Laser Feast and Sandra Ciampone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices