Emergence Magazine Podcast

Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian, specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. In this essay, Bathsheba accompanies a Gwitchin friend on a moose hunt north of the Arctic Circle, and witnesses patterns of contrasting stories manifested in the landscape: one of conquest and inattention seen in collapsing river banks and melting permafrost; and another of restraint, held in the quiet knowing of the moose.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we’re featuring a favorite interview from our archives: Emergence Executive Editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee’s conversation with the acclaimed British writer Robert Macfarlane. The two originally spoke in 2019, as part of our language-themed issue, in a conversation that explored the lyrical relationship between language and landscapes, and the consequence, responsibility, and the pleasure of naming the living world.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charles Foster is a writer, barrister, and traveler. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide and The Screaming Sky. In this essay, Charles considers his role as a writer seeking to experience and express communion with the more-than-human world, and begins to wonder if language can do anything other than constrain and tame the tangled wild. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Natalie Rose Richardson is a poet and writer who was born in New York City to a long line of border-crossers and proud people of blended heritage. In this essay, Natalie searches for her great-grandfather’s grave in a historically segregated cemetery and confronts the American notion of paradise as an ideology which imposes walls of separation onto the multilayered landscape—allowing some in and keeping others out.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

J. Drew Lanham is a birder, naturalist, and hunter-conservationist. He is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. In this powerful reading, Drew recites his poem Joy is the Justice we Give Ourselves, a celebration of the radical act of joy through lifting up liberation, reparations, justice, and deep connection to ancestors and the living world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen Lezak is a PhD Candidate in the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. His work focuses on the politics of climate change in the context of communities and landscapes in the North American Arctic. In this essay, Stephen explores the paradoxical human narratives that overlay the Arctic landscape—a frontier, a paradise, a marker of our destruction of the planet—as he bears witness to a place that is teetering in an uneasy balance between eternity and loss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the pandemic begins to ebb and we begin to emerge from a difficult and transformative year, we are taking a moment to pause as the warmth of summer and the cool shade of trees—here in the Northern Hemisphere—beckons to us. Kimberly Ruffin is a Certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide and author of Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions. As a companion to Kimberly’s past Emergence essay “Bodies of Evidence,” she created a guided practice of walking through the forest. For Kimberly, faith is a continuous exchange of belonging, an experience that’s palpable among trees.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gina Rae La Cerva is a geographer, environmental anthropologist, and the author of Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food. In this essay, Gina Rae revisits her grandfather’s recipes in order to trace the elements of her Sicilian heritage. Through legacies of wild food gathering and feasting, she seeks to embody the traditions that have brought her family joy and sustenance, even in times of grief, conquest, and migration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Hunt is a writer, journalist, and storyteller, and the author of Walking the Woods and the Water and Where the Wild Winds Are. In this essay, Nick ventures into the Forest of Dean, an ancient mixed woodland, where he searches for the unruly, twilight realm of the boar—a creature who brings him to the boundary between wildness and civilization, history and myth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Heather Swan is a poet, writer, and beekeeper. She is the author of Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field. In this essay, Heather travels to Columbia, where nearly fifty percent of the country’s 4,300 native species of orchid are endangered. As the Colombian people and landscape continue to recover from a half century of civil war, she meets one family who is pursuing restoration and resiliency by cultivating native orchids and returning them to the wild. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices