Emergence Magazine Podcast

In this extended meditation on the relationship between place and intimacy, the body and the word, Carl Phillips walks among trees to explore what can and cannot be known. Carl is the author of numerous books including Wild Is the Wind, Reconnaisance, Riding Westward, and The Rest of Love.https://emergencemagazine.org/story/among-the-trees Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The poet W.S. Merwin spent the last four decades of his life on Maui, restoring a plot of abandoned land that would become one of the most diverse and expansive palm tree gardens in the world. In this essay, staff writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder visits these lush nineteen acres, now home to more than 3,000 palm trees and more than 400 unique species. Merwin wrote poetry in the morning and spent his afternoons planting and tending to trees. His poems are living witness to the care he offered to this land.https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-poet-and-the-palm-tree/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this interview, science writer David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, speaks about the root causes underlying the current pandemic and explores the ways in which viruses are embedded in the same systems of ecology and evolutionary biology that we are. As we disrupt wild ecosystems and shake these viruses free, COVID-19 offers an opportunity to reimagine our relationship with the natural world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After visiting a two-thousand-year-old Linden tree in England, William Bryant Logan explores the nearly forgotten practice of coppicing, or cutting back a tree to stimulate growth, and discovers a symbiotic relationship between humans and trees. William is the author of Sprout Lands, Oak, Air, and Dirt. He is a certified arborist and serves on the faculty of the New York Botanical Garden. https://emergencemagazine.org/story/woods-work/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When a marble mine began to strip a village of its forests, the people of Piplantri, India, developed a tree-planting project that reclaims a vital and ancient relationship between trees and women.www.emergencemagazine.org/story/111-trees Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, ecologist Lauren E. Oakes looks beyond the scientific lens of subject-object while studying the consequences of climate change on a dying community of yellow cedars in the Alaskan archipelago. Lauren is the author of In Search of the Canary Tree. https://emergencemagazine.org/story/on-survival-the-dead-the-sapling-and-the-ancients/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nearly all of Ethiopia’s original trees have disappeared, but small pockets of old-growth forest still surround Ethiopia’s churches, living arks of biodiversity amongst the brown grazing fields. In this essay, Fred Bahnson travels to Ethiopia to gain a deeper understanding of how our fate is tied with the fate of trees. Fred teaches at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, where he directs the Food, Health, and Ecological Well-Being Program and the author of Soil and Sacrament.https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-church-forests-of-ethiopia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Hunt visits Białowieża, Europe’s largest surviving primeval forest, where life and death transform into one another with vigorous entanglement. Here, he traces the history of the European forest, revealing an ongoing battle between light and shadow, clearing and woods. Nick is a writer, journalist, and the author of Where the Wild Winds Are and Walking the Woods and the Water.   https://emergencemagazine.org/story/dead-wood Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this essay, Amaud Jamaul Johnson returns to his poem “The Maple Remains” for the centennial anniversary of the Red Summer of 1919. Through historical witnessing we see the deep ties between racial and arboreal scars. Amaud is an award-winning poet and the author of Darktown Follies and Red Summer. https://emergencemagazine.org/story/felling-light/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this multi-sensory essay, David George Haskell invites us into the unique, and sometimes surprising, aromas of eleven different species of trees. David is author of The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors and The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature. https://emergencemagazine.org/story/eleven-ways/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices