Emergence Magazine Podcast

How can stories return us to what is essential as we navigate an uncertain future? In this conversation with Amitav Ghosh, author of The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, he calls on storytellers to lead us in the necessary work of collective reimagining—decentering human narratives and re-centering stories of the land.Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Three: Roots.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do we root ourselves in times of isolation and disorientation? As birder and writer J. Drew Lanham encounters his backyard during the pandemic lockdown, he designates it as a newly sanctioned “wild-like refuge”—a place that is brimming with life as he notices the wildlife that inhabits the nearby faraway.Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Three: Roots.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We begin Chapter Three with a story that explores language as a technology capable of transforming our lived realities. As a Native scholar and poet, Jake Skeets considers the necessary interrogation of colonial naming and narratives, and how the Indigenous application of writing as a technology can reshape our world as we move into an unknown future.Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Three: Roots.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This sonic journey written and narrated by David G. Haskell brings us to the beginning of sound and song on planet Earth. The experience is made entirely of tiny trembling waves in air, the fugitive, ephemeral energy that we call sound. Spoken words combined with terrestrial sounds invite our senses and imaginations to go outward into an experience of the living Earth and its history. How did the vast and varied chorus of modern sounds—from forest to oceans to human music—emerge from life’s community? When did the living Earth first start to sing? We invite you on a journey into deep time and deep sound that will open your ears and your imagination.If you enjoy this audio story, check out David’s new companion practice, Playful Listening, which invites you to immerse yourself in the sonic world around you. Available on the Emergence Magazine website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daegan Miller is the author of This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent. In this essay, Daegan visits the tree that marks the thousandth westward mile of the Transcontinental Railroad and considers how our historical landmarks have shifted in meaning, leaving us adrift and disoriented in the Anthropocene.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Around the world, trees are on the move. Last year we published a special multimedia story, told from the perspectives of four native tree species, that explores what is at stake for both ecological and human communities as forests migrate. In this re-release of “They Carry Us With Them,” Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder narrates the feature story, chronicling the possible disappearance of the black ash tree from the state of Maine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In our final installment on the theme of Ashes from Chapter Two of Living with the Unknown, we enter a fictional world dominated by the monotony and tireless momentum of greed. In this short story from Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason, time expands and collapses as an architect in Reykjavíik struggles against the soulless design of urban landscapes in the Anthropocene.Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Two: Ashes.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Acclaimed poet Camille T. Dungy bears witness to an encounter between a man and an elephant. In an effort to make sense of a world in which so much has been lost, this poem offers us the opportunity to step into a moment where past harm gives way to an expansive recognition of love.Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Two: Ashes.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, Daisy Hildyard, a scholar of the history of science, examines three stories of atrocity and considers how whiteness has inscribed itself onto the land through violence. In what ways, she asks, does human history blur into the nonhuman world and into the present moment?Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Two: Ashes.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, writer and journalist Anna Badkhen brings us into histories of imperial collapse. As we continue our exploration of the theme of Ashes and what it means to live in a moment of unraveling, she asks: How do we come to terms with the world we have made? How do we make space for hope and sanctuary?Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Two: Ashes.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices