Podcast

What if we listened to the complex clicks of whales and could understand their meanings? What would we hear and how might we respond? More-Than-Human (MOTH) Life Collective founder César Rodríguez-Garavito, artist and technologist James Bridle, and author Rebecca Giggs come together in this conversation with Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee to explore the ethical, legal, and relational implications of a new project using AI machine learning to translate the speech of sperm whales. Contemplating the human-centric linking of language with intelligence, the moral complexities of collecting and using these translations, and what it might mean to have an ear for “whale-ish,” they discuss whether a shared language is even needed to find a depth of kinship with whales.

In this conversation, acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane asks the ancient and urgent question: is a river alive? Understanding rivers to be presences, not resources, he immerses us in the ways they “irrigate our bodies, thoughts, songs, and stories,” and how we might recognize this within our imagination and ethics. He speaks about his latest book, and traces his journeys down the Río Los Cedros in Ecuador, the waterways of Chennai in India, and the Mutehekau Shipu in Nitassinan and how each brought him to experience these water bodies as willful, spirited, and sacred beings.

Writer Nicholas Triolo walks the length of the Rio Côa in central Portugal with a book by Christian mystic Thomas Merton in his pack. For Merton, the living world shimmered with a divine feminine presence, meaning all within it was worthy of our love. Along the winding landscape of the Côa, damaged by agriculture and home to endangered animals, Nicholas witnesses the messy, subversive nature of “rewilding.” And with Merton as his companion on the journey, he begins to feel a wild, relational divinity in the land around him, and a devotion essential to rewilding place and self amid today’s crises of despair and destruction.

Nick Hunt traverses the spine of the Curonian Spit in the Baltic Sea, and learns how its sands—anchored by forest roots for millennia—began to move rapidly and swallow villages in the eighteenth century when woodlands and sacred groves were systematically clear-cut for timber. Though halted through engineering and reforestation, the dunes are now eroding under human footsteps, and spilling into the lagoon they border. As he witnesses how quickly landscapes are changed by our own hands, Nick asks if the challenge is not in reversing the damage we’ve done, but in remembering humility before the forces of the Earth.

English novelist Daisy Hildyard envisions the deep time evolution of the coastline of Scarborough, North Yorkshire: from a prehistoric meteor strike, to a 19th-century seaside aquarium devoid of fish, a present-day spate of dead tides, and a future where part of the human population has evolved into a hybrid marine species, drawn back to the cradle of the sea to care for its degraded waters. Vividly narrated by acclaimed British actor Colin Salmon, and created as part of Wild Eye—an art and nature trail in Yorkshire that raises awareness about coastal erosion in the face of climate change—this short story traces the forever-shifting tides of our relationship with the sea.

In celebration of Earth Day, this episode invites you to offer your ears to the polyphony of sounds and silences that give the planet Her voice with two of our most cherished audio stories. “When the Earth Started to Sing,” by biologist David G. Haskell, combines human speech with more-than-human voices to immerse your senses in the connective power of sound across deep time. “Sanctuaries of Silence,” an adaptation of our virtual reality experience featuring acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, brings you to the Hoh Rain Forest—one of the quietest places in North America—and guides you through the sounds that emerge in the absence of noise.

As humans, we long for stability, yet the Earth tells us in many languages—erosion, ice melt, the seasons—that all is fleeting in an endless cycle of creation and destruction. Grappling with her fear of change caused by wildfires in Montana and the long-overdue Cascadia earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, Erica Berry confronts how the colonial erasure of Indigenous stories of place and her own limited sense of time have blinded her to the Earth’s dramatic flux. As she learns that impermanence doesn’t always signal loss, but rather the transformation of form, she finds a way to hold the fluctuation of the lands she loves.

Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

In the tradition of telling the bees, beekeepers relay the news of a death in the family to each of their hives, oftentimes draping them in black mourning cloth. As bee colonies in the US perish in record numbers, Emily Polk wonders if bees not only witness human grief, but also feel loss themselves. Meeting with a famous Yemeni beekeeper in downtown Oakland, California, and scientists from around the world studying bee behavior and cognition, she learns of the enduring generosity and spirit of survival of these tiny creatures, and glimpses the greater circles of loss that connect us with the more-than-human world.

On a field trip to Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador in 2022, mycologist Giuliana Furci, author Robert Macfarlane, legal scholar and More Than Human (MOTH) Life Collective founder César Rodríguez-Garavito, and musician Cosmo Sheldrake wrote and recorded “Song of the Cedars”—a composition made not just in the forest, but in conscious collaboration with it. Rich with field recordings of the ecosystem and the track’s entwined human and more-than-human melodies, this conversation between the foursome explores their ongoing effort to gain legal recognition of Los Cedros as co-creator of the song, which if successful, will be a world first.

In this experiential essay, Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta breaks the constructs of linear time and storytelling with love magic—a connective substance that transcends time and space—and explores how we might slip between the cracks of the linear and maintain connection across time. Drawing on the knowledge encoded in a traditional boomerang he carved from silky oak, Tyson urges us to flow with love magic; to “swim in its currents” to offset the greed and extraction that is consuming the world.

From the archive, this week’s episode is a conversation with author and artist Jenny Odell. Speaking about her book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, she challenges the social and cultural ideas that underpin standardized, mechanized time, and imagines how we might instead attune to the rhythms of the Earth and embrace interruptions that allow us to glimpse the inherent unpredictability and creativity of every moment. What choices, what futures, might become possible, she asks, if we stepped out of chronos time and towards a kairos time?

What does a place, a community, look like when it welcomes home Indigenous presence? Recorded in January 2025, this new fourth episode of “Coming Home to the Cove” explores the impact of Theresa Harlan’s work to protect, restore, and rematriate Felix Cove over the last three years—from widening community awareness of Coast Miwok history; to opening hearts to allyship between Indigenous and settler families; and running traditional ecological knowledge workshops. Amid ongoing vandalism of her ancestral home, rancher evictions, and new land management, Theresa continues to fight for a larger vision of healing, and asks, are we willing to come together to honor the entire story of a land?

This audio series is the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their home and one woman’s determination to bring the living history of her family back to the land. Episode Three examines the role Spanish missions, boarding schools, and ranching empires played in driving many Coast Miwok people from their ancestral lands; and follows Theresa Harlan and her relatives on a boat trip to Felix Cove to experience their mothers’ perspective of arriving at their home from the water. Next episode, we’ll be sharing a new fourth installment to the series, tracing the impact of Theresa’s vision to restore and protect Felix Cove over the last three years, and the ongoing challenges of creating space for Indigenous history.

This series tells the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their ancestral home on a cove in Tomales Bay in Northern California, and one woman’s effort to bring the living history of her family back to the land. Episode Two traces the Coast Miwok’s ten-plus-millennia-long presence in this landscape. Rich with interviews with a local historian and members of Theresa Harlan’s family, this episode asks: How is it that ten thousand years of continuous human civilization is seemingly invisible today? And who gets to define history?