Emergence Magazine Podcast

As part of our recent series of online offerings, the Emergence Magazine Book Club spent the month of April reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s celebrated, best-selling book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. For the Book Club’s last meeting, Robin joined us in a vibrant live video zoom conversation, hosted by acclaimed writer Robert Macfarlane. Responding to questions asked by readers from around the globe, Robin discussed dandelions as global citizens, the role of the writer as a conduit for story, and the spirit of reciprocity that lies at the heart of our relationship to place. It was just a conversation that was too rich not to be shared on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Self-quarantined and isolated in her apartment in Brooklyn, Hala Alyan is more aware than ever of humanity’s interdependence—suddenly exposed as a raw, pulsing nerve. With all of us inescapably together as we move through this pandemic, how, she asks, can we make room for grief, empathy, and hope? Hala is an award-winning Palestinian American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in numerous journals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the wake of COVID-19, Lisa Lee Herrick challenges the resurgence of dangerous historical frames of race and belonging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Facing the paradoxes and ambiguities enmeshed with the COVID-19 pandemic, David Abram finds beauty in the midst of shuddering terror. As we’re isolated in this uncertain time, he writes, we can turn to the more-than-human world to empower our empathy for each other.Read the essay on our site: https://emergencemagazine.org/story/our-unknowing/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Elie is the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Reinventing Bach and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. As part of our celebration of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day we invited Paul Elie to trace the literary history of the environmental movement from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment. Though the plight of the Earth has become a fixture of collective consciousness, he asks if we will live up to the promise of unified action on behalf of the Earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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