Emergence Magazine Podcast

Witnessing the cry of the Earth, in its myriad permutations, can evoke real responses of grief and deep love for the planet. As we begin to acknowledge the wounds we’ve inflicted upon our nonhuman kin, how can tender connections with a harmed Earth foster spaces of healing? In this week’s podcast, poet and author Camille T. Dungy reaches for the possibility of sanctuary amid pain and loss. Bearing witness to an encounter between a man and an injured elephant, her poem offers us the opportunity to step into a moment where past harm gives way to an expansive recognition of love.Read this poem.Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week.Cover artwork by Studio Airport. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this short story, Booker Prize–winning Nigerian author and poet Ben Okri envisions the tragedy and peace of a post-human world. Twenty thousand years into the future, an exploration of Earth uncovers the final notes and unfinished stories left by the last human beings in the twilight of their civilization. Reflecting on humanity’s genius for extraction and domination, this uncanny tale, narrated by acclaimed British actor Colin Salmon, follows our trajectory into extinction and invites the question: When will we truly comprehend the future we have seeded?Read this story on our website.Find “Thylacine” and other “Short Stories of Apocalypse,” in our inaugural print fiction collection.Learn more about our current immersive exhibition in London. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES.Cover artwork by Studio Airport. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Bridle, a writer, artist, and technologist, questions our assumptions about intelligence and AI models. They advocate for embracing the unknowable and the unpredictable, shifting away from humancentric thinking. They discuss the importance of redefining intelligence and recognizing different forms in diverse creatures. The podcast explores solidarity with the non-human world, agency in coping with climate grief, and the upcoming immersive exhibition in London.

In one of our favorite stories, “Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System,” Potawatomi mother, scientist, and professor Robin Wall Kimmerer takes us through the nine-thousand-year existence of maize, reflecting on the ancient circle of reciprocity that links humans and corn and what has been severed in this once deeply sacred relationship. With an eye to the unsustainable industrial practices—GMOs, monoculture, use of toxic fertilizers—that continue to dominate the landscape of agriculture, Robin invites us to reconnect with the age-old teachings and kinships, held within plants, that are waiting to be remembered.Explore this feature.Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s experiences of pregnancy and motherhood bring her into an emerging realization of her own mammalhood. When she encounters her animal self, deeply embedded in the ecosystems around her, it transforms everything: her sense of home and safety; what it means to feel, to act, to care through the ancient, feral knowledge of instinct. Listening for teachings from the Earth, Kerri feels her way through the anguish and tenderness of raising a child in a burning and breaking—and beautiful—world.Read this essay.Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do our inheritances shape our lives? In this week’s narrated essay, Afro-Taína author Jamie Figueroa brings her pen to the erased and fragmented pages of her family’s history, exploring writing as a tool of revelation and reclamation amid a legacy of assimilation into white colonialist culture. As she works to uncover the inherited wounds of her ancestors housed in her own bodily cells, she also reaches for a deeper remembering—writing her way into the landscapes and the cultural memories that bring together pieces of her identity.Read this essay.Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, we share a short story by Mexican author Laia Jufresa, translated by Sophie Hughes, that imagines the chaos of a world ravaged and divided by climate change. In “Be Dammed,” thousands of climate refugees find themselves forming settlements on boats as they wait endlessly to cross a heavily guarded border in pursuit of safety. One woman, tasked with holding prayers for their salvation, negotiates the entanglement of faith and politics as she considers who, or what, truly has the power to change their circumstances.Read this short story.Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What can we learn from imprints in the earth about the ancient presences that left them behind? Acclaimed author Anna Badkhen traces markers left in the earth from the near and distant past, from the buffalo wallows of North America to the treasure-hiding game sekretiki she played as a child, from the histories held in whale earwax to the map of our human becoming in the Bouri Peninsula of modern-day Ethiopia. Reading each of these imprints as a kind of porthole—a window into memory, with all the retellings and reinterpretations characteristic of our messy, continual search for meaning—Anna wonders what lineage of impressions we might leave for the future.Read this essay.Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder discusses the changing patterns of tree migration in Maine, specifically focusing on the threats faced by black ash forests and the impact on Wabanaki black ash basketmakers. The podcast explores the decline of black ash trees, the strategy of releasing parasitoid wasps to control the emerald ash borer beetle population, and the potential impacts of invasive plants and pests on forests. It also touches on the intentional planting of black ash trees for future generations and an immersive exhibition showcasing artists' work on shifting landscapes.

In light of the intensifying climate crises we face today, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates examine the opposing narratives of survival embodied by two birds in perhaps the most abiding of all Flood myths—Noah’s Ark. Questioning the dove's familiar story of salvation for the few, they urge us to follow the raven into a new world of widened and inclusive refuge.Read this story.Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume.Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices