Emergence Magazine Podcast

Since lockdowns began, there has been an unprecedented reduction in human-created noise. Our movements have lessened, the circle of our existence is closer, we are more still. As the din of human activity has quieted down, the sounds of the living world have come to the forefront. Around the world people have reported hearing an increase in the songs of birds, the chirping of insects, and the myriad sounds of non-human life. A newfound silence is pervading many of our environments as cars, planes, and industries have increasingly been brought to a standstill.A couple of years ago, we spent a few days filming a virtual reality project in Olympic National Park’s Hoh Rain Forest with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton. Gordon has traveled the globe documenting the impacts of noise pollution on the natural world. His work has revealed that silence (which he describes as the absence of human generated noise) is on the verge of extinction and that even the most remote corners of the world are impacted by the noises

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

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

In this extensive interview, Richard Powers discusses his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory and his intention to tell a story in which humans are not separate from the living world around them.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andri Snær Magnason is an Icelandic writer and documentary filmmaker. In this interview, Andri discusses his new book On Time and Water and our relationship to time in an age of ecological crisis. With Iceland having lost its first large glacier, the Ok glacier, this past summer—Andri discusses the ways in which geological time is beginning to move at the speed of human time. In order to bring about a planetary paradigm shift, he says, we need new ways to see and imagine ourselves into the future.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this vibrant conversation, poet and author Forrest Gander interviews Richard Powers about his acclaimed new novel The Overstory. Recorded during a live event co-presented by Emergence Magazine and Point Reyes Books, the two Pulitzer Prize-winning authors reflect on continuity, kinship, and proximity with the living world. Advocating a radical reimagining of the novel that moves away from the centering of human characters, Powers speaks of a new ethic that includes an understanding that there is no separate thing called us and no other separate thing called wilderness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rowen White is a Seed Keeper from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and an activist for seed sovereignty. In this in-depth interview, Rowen shares what seeds—her greatest teachers—have shown her: that resilience is rooted in diversity, and that all of us carry encoded memories of how to plant and care for seeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices