Emergence Magazine Podcast

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

In this short story by Japanese author Masatsugu Ono, translated and narrated by Sam Malissa, a woman and her young son move to an abandoned seaside village along Japan’s eastern coast, where they’re met by the well-meaning attention of its curious last inhabitants and their wise old dog. As a typhoon rises from the sea, reality, memory, and illusion begin to collapse into one another—and the pair find themselves increasingly inseparable from the mysterious landscape.Read this essay on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this week’s essay, Natalie Rose Richardson begins to experience a quality of attention that birdwatching can cultivate. Learning from Chicago historian Sherry Williams, who has piloted programs exploring the relationship between bird migration and the Great Migration, and J. Drew Lanham, an ornithologist and poet whose work engages confluences of race, place, and nature, Natalie follows a migration path from Chicago to South Carolina that brings the practice of birdwatching together with her own layered history. In landscapes both new and familiar, she shows us what’s possible when we bear witness with eyes wide open.Read this essay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Visiting the Ross Ice Shelf across several seasons, Stephanie Kryzwonos interrogates the heroic narratives of male exploration and conquest—written almost entirely by white men—that gender the land through feminine tropes. Might these characterizations, borne of a colonizing hunger to conquer and subdue, say more about the culture they come from than about the land they describe? What would happen, Stephanie asks, if we moved beyond fantasies and savior complexes, and instead approached Antarctica as a living place with agency?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

 In a world rapidly spiraling into climate turmoil, will we reorient to welcome migration not only as a right, but a necessary human adaptation? In this week’s essay, writer Tristan McConnell ventures across Turkana in northwest Kenya, home of the Great Rift Valley: a place where some of our earliest ancestors emerged millions of years ago before dispersing in waves first across, and then out of the continent. As he discovers how deeply human movement, landscape, and survival are entwined, he wonders what such a place might remind us about who we truly are, and have always been.Read this story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Explore the profound interplay between grief, love, and our connection to the earth. Embrace the transformative power of liminal spaces during times of change. Discover how personal and collective awakenings shape our perception of reality. Engage in daily actions rooted in love and creativity, and reconnect with your true self through kinship with nature. This insightful discussion urges us to navigate the unknown and foster deeper relationships, ultimately inviting us to witness both beauty and devastation as part of our shared existence.

Writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder examines the prophecies and histories of violence in the American Great Plains. Explores sand hills prairies, General Sherman's role, Union Pacific Railroad's influence, family memories, fragile sandhills ecosystem, and embracing the wind and immersing in the Niabriara River.

How might our human systems work differently if they were adapted to receive input from the nonhuman creatures they involve and impact? In this week’s narrated essay, writer and ethicist Melanie Challenger considers what it would take to expand the democratic imagination to include and represent animal voices in the decisions that affect them. Advocating for a quieting of our own narratives so that we might recognize political signals from the behaviors of the vast community around us, she envisions the revolutionary mechanisms which could make present the expressions of animals within our systems of power.Read this story on our website.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