Emergence Magazine Podcast

Amitav Ghosh is an Indian-born scholar, novelist, and nonfiction writer. His many books include The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, in which he explores our imaginative failure in an age of ecological crisis. In this interview, Amitav speaks about his newest book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, and how the widespread silencing of nonhuman voices is deeply entangled in capitalism and the geopolitical structures that sustain it. Storytellers, he says, must lead us in the necessary work of collective reimagining: decentering human narratives and re-centering stories of the land.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this in-depth interview, Rowen White 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.As we prepare to gather around our tables for Thanksgiving, we are re-sharing this conversation from 2019 as an invitation to honor and remember the embodied histories and relationships that are carried by the foods that nourish us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month we released a special multimedia feature exploring the migration of trees and what is at stake for both ecological and human communities as forests move. Following up from last week's story on black ash, staff writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder shares three tree migration vignettes: sugar maple, paper birch, and red spruce. Each offers a glimpse of just one aspect of tree migration: nourishment, forest succession, and industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month we released a special multimedia feature exploring the migration of trees and what is at stake for both ecological and human communities as forests move. This week we hear from staff writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder as she narrates her feature story, They Carry Us With Them, about the potential disappearance of the black ash tree from the state of Maine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As part of a new Emergence series, we’re publishing a selection of essays from Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations—a five-volume collection edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer. Diane Wilson is a writer, speaker, editor, and the Executive Director for the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance. She is the author of The Seed Keeper; Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past; and Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life. In this essay, Diane asks what it means to be a good relative to the land as she endeavors to restore balance between the native and invasive plants around her home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dara McAnulty is a teenage autistic author, naturalist, and conservationist from Northern Ireland. After several years of writing his blog, Naturalist Dara, he published his debut book, Diary of a Young Naturalist, when he was fourteen years old. The book won the 2020 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, and Book of the Year for the Narrative Non-fiction British Book Awards in 2021. In this interview, Dara, now seventeen, speaks about his book and his approach to living a life immersed in and guided by the living world. Wise beyond his years, Dara speaks about his identity as an autistic person, the solace and comfort he has always found in nature, the role of the artist in envisioning a different future, and the great necessity of staying rooted in joy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard Powers, author of *Bewilderment* and Pulitzer Prize-winner *The Overstory*, delves into the essence of altruism and kinship. He explores whether our genetic makeup underpins our capacity for selflessness, suggesting that storytelling fosters a sense of belonging. Powers highlights how kinship transcends blood ties, rooted instead in shared values and experiences. He reflects on the interconnectedness of nature, especially through trees, framing them as symbols of interdependence and the cooperative spirit needed to address today's ecological challenges.

Catherine Bush is the author of five novels, including Blaze Island, Accusation, and Claire’s Head. She is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Guelph and divides her time between Toronto and the countryside of eastern Ontario. In this essay, Catherine tends to the understory in a time of mounting ecological loss. As invasive plants proliferate in a park near her childhood home in Toronto, she considers her family’s own history as transplanted immigrants and how acts of reciprocity and care for the land might unknit despair.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re featuring this episode from our Language Keepers podcast series in honor of Marie Wilcox, the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language and the creator of the first and only Wukchumni dictionary. On Saturday, September 25, 2021, Marie passed away at the age of 88. Marie was a remarkable woman who was deeply committed to her family, the Wukchumni language, and to the Native language revitalization movement. She worked tirelessly for years to ensure the survival of her language, an effort that will serve her family and community for generations to come.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jack Dash and Luke Swenson are the creators of Atascosa Borderlands, a visual storytelling project combining botanical survey, oral history, and documentary photography to explore the Atascosa Highlands: an ecological crossroads that straddles the US and Mexico border in the Sonoran Desert. This piece documents Jack and Luke’s recent visit to the Highlands, where ancient populations of silverleaf oak, saguaro, and sweet acacia grow with no sense that the land around them is divided. But as the border wall imposes a hard boundary, this island of biodiversity faces an increasingly fragmented future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices