Emergence Magazine Podcast

As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. While the free market system we embrace in the United States touts individualism and defines value by monetary worth, a gift economy functions through an ethic of reciprocity and interconnection. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies of exchange? “Thriving is possible,” she writes, “only if you have nurtured strong relations with your community.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this in-depth interview, Reverend angel Kyodo williams reflects on our widespread crisis of story, the failure of institutional religions to offer a new way forward, and her philosophy of Radical Dharma—a path to individual and collective liberation. This interview was originally published in 2019 as part of our Faith Issue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a chemical plant in St. James Parish, Louisiana, threatens a majority Black community with toxic emissions, Boyce Upholt looks deeply at the nature of air and considers how it can challenge the often white ideal of the wild as a place of escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, poet Jake Skeets enters into the memories he shares through touch and, in doing so, conjures a deep reverence for the spaces we remember. From a stubbled chin and stucco wall to bloody knees and tadpoles, the memories he shares are held in the physicality of the body. It is through what he calls “radical remembering,” which carries us across the time and space of existence, that he unfolds these “memory fields” through language and storytelling and offers this Diné perspective of time, memory, and land. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rowen White is a Seedkeeper from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and an activist for Indigenous seed sovereignty. In this in-depth interview originally published in our Food Issue, Rowen shares what seeds—her greatest teachers—have shown her: that resilience is rooted in diversity and that seeds carry the potential for the restoration of the living systems that nourish us. Seeds, she says, reflect back to us encoded memories of how to nurture a food system that is rooted in a culture of belonging. As we gather safely around the table this coming week, we invite you to consider our relationship to the foods that nourish us and to reflect on the encoded memories of planting and care that you carry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, CMarie Fuhrman encounters a coyote whose leg is caught in a trap in the southern Montana prairie. As she decides what to do, she navigates the two legacies of her identity—Native and white. In doing so, she considers what it means to be trapped and what it means to be free. CMarie is the author of “Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems” and co-editor of “Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Conversation, and Craft.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, ecological historian Bathsheba Demuth travels across the easternmost edge of northern Russia—home to the Native Chukchi people and their herds of reindeer. As she uncovers the history of this landscape, she encounters the allure of the apocalyptic arc—the promise of a new world—and the rise and ruin of the Soviet ideology that sought to impose its utopian vision on the Chukchi, their reindeer, and the natural cycles of the Russian tundra. Through the Soviet project’s ambition to “tame” the tundra and turn the living world into an economic resource, we are confronted with uneasy parallels to capitalist society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this interview, Sandor Katz discusses his new book, Fermentation as Metaphor. A world-renowned expert in fermented foods, Sandor considers the liberating experience offered through engagement with microbial communities. He shares that the simple act of fermentation can give rise to deeply intimate moments of connection through the magic of invisible forces that transform our foods and our lives, generation by generation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the Yangtze Valley, to Neolithic Mesopotamia, to the orchards of Oxford, Roger Deakin sought to understand the origins of the domesticated apple. His essay East of Eden—an excerpted chapter from his book Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees—recounts his journey into the wild fruit forests that grow on the mountainsides of Kazakhstan. After Roger’s death in 2006, Robert MacFarlane planted a sapling grown from an apple seed that Roger carried home. As ‘Roger’s tree’ now fruits in his yard, Robert collects the pips to distribute to others, envisioning a “worldwide wildwood of memory-trees.” This essay is narrated by Robert Macfarlane. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gathering wild foods was once a practice of deep observation, carried out by women who knew the ways of wild medicine. In this narrated essay, Gina Rae La Cerva considers the widespread loss of this traditional knowledge and the generations of women in her family who have intimately known the land. How, she asks, can the ancient feminine understanding of wildness and foraging serve a fragmented world? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices