Emergence Magazine Podcast

In this week’s essay, Natalie Rose Richardson begins to experience a quality of attention that birdwatching can cultivate. Learning from Chicago historian Sherry Williams, who has piloted programs exploring the relationship between bird migration and the Great Migration, and J. Drew Lanham, an ornithologist and poet whose work engages confluences of race, place, and nature, Natalie follows a migration path from Chicago to South Carolina that brings the practice of birdwatching together with her own layered history. In landscapes both new and familiar, she shows us what’s possible when we bear witness with eyes wide open.Read this essay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Visiting the Ross Ice Shelf across several seasons, Stephanie Kryzwonos interrogates the heroic narratives of male exploration and conquest—written almost entirely by white men—that gender the land through feminine tropes. Might these characterizations, borne of a colonizing hunger to conquer and subdue, say more about the culture they come from than about the land they describe? What would happen, Stephanie asks, if we moved beyond fantasies and savior complexes, and instead approached Antarctica as a living place with agency?Read this story.Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume.Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

 In a world rapidly spiraling into climate turmoil, will we reorient to welcome migration not only as a right, but a necessary human adaptation? In this week’s essay, writer Tristan McConnell ventures across Turkana in northwest Kenya, home of the Great Rift Valley: a place where some of our earliest ancestors emerged millions of years ago before dispersing in waves first across, and then out of the continent. As he discovers how deeply human movement, landscape, and survival are entwined, he wonders what such a place might remind us about who we truly are, and have always been.Read this story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Explore the profound interplay between grief, love, and our connection to the earth. Embrace the transformative power of liminal spaces during times of change. Discover how personal and collective awakenings shape our perception of reality. Engage in daily actions rooted in love and creativity, and reconnect with your true self through kinship with nature. This insightful discussion urges us to navigate the unknown and foster deeper relationships, ultimately inviting us to witness both beauty and devastation as part of our shared existence.

Writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder examines the prophecies and histories of violence in the American Great Plains. Explores sand hills prairies, General Sherman's role, Union Pacific Railroad's influence, family memories, fragile sandhills ecosystem, and embracing the wind and immersing in the Niabriara River.

How might our human systems work differently if they were adapted to receive input from the nonhuman creatures they involve and impact? In this week’s narrated essay, writer and ethicist Melanie Challenger considers what it would take to expand the democratic imagination to include and represent animal voices in the decisions that affect them. Advocating for a quieting of our own narratives so that we might recognize political signals from the behaviors of the vast community around us, she envisions the revolutionary mechanisms which could make present the expressions of animals within our systems of power.Read this story on our website.Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Histories are enduring presences. No matter how deeply they are buried, they remain. In this week’s narrated essay, author Lauret E. Savoy meditates on the history of the Chesapeake region and the vestiges of collision and rupture that continue to mark its physical and cultural terrains. Surfacing ancient geological movements alongside the deliberate construction of race in colonial America, she considers the entwinement of tectonic and human histories—the ancestral structures that remain in plain sight and out of view.Read this essay on our website.Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume.Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As rapid warming, pollution, habitat destruction, and insidious violence against other species speeds up the rate of extinction and edges ecosystems ever-closer to collapse, what voids are left in the tapestry of the living world? In this short story, novelist Lydia Millet imagines the plight of the last remaining Tasmanian tiger—a creature caught in the crosshairs of Australia’s settler narrative, eventually hunted to the point of extinction. As a man seeks the company of the tiger, housed in a failing zoo, he summons the courage to care for what remains amid an overwhelming sorrow for what has been lost.Read this story on our website.Find "Thylacine" and other "Short Stories of Apocalypse," in our inaugural print fiction collection.Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this audio experience by biologist and acclaimed author David George Haskell, we are invited to be attentive to the songs and stories that thrum in the air around us. Hearing three billion years of our planet’s sound evolution—a lineage of language—in the trills, hoops, barks, bugles, clicks, and pulses of the life around him, David shares the connection to both deep time and the more-than-human world that can be found when we tune in to the Earth’s orchestra. Made entirely of the tiny trembling waves in air, the fugitive, ephemeral energy that we call sound, this experience combines human speech with other voices to immerse our senses and imaginations in the generative, provoking, and unifying power of sound.If you enjoy this audio story, check out David’s companion practice, Playful Listening, which invites you to immerse yourself in the sonic world around you. And listen to our interview with David, “Listening and the Crisis of Inattention” on our website.Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this story, Diné poet and author Jake Skeets honors the food traditions that have sustained his people since time immemorial. As he prepares to butcher a sheep for Kinaałda, a Diné puberty ceremony of family and song, Jake contemplates reclaiming culture and restoring the relationships between people and land, food and community. Summoning the experiences that have shaped his own kinship with food, he puts forth story as a pathway to food sovereignty, reminding us that “the beauty of the beyond and the beauty of the world” come together in each bite.Read this story on our website.Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices