Podcast

As we look to an uncertain future, what systems of exchange might we embrace that support and deepen our interdependence? In this essay, Potawatomi scientist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, considering the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy.

Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Experience “Chapter Four: Futures.”

Artwork by Studio Airport

In this meditative exploration, Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder witnesses her daughter learning to speak and wonders how to listen for a language of mothering that is in service to all of life’s beings.

Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Experience “Chapter Four: Futures.”

Artwork by Azadeh Elmizadeh

Suzanne Simard is known for her groundbreaking research on the belowground fungal networks that connect trees and facilitate inter-tree communication and interaction. We continue to explore Futures this week with another story on motherhood—this time within the world of trees. In this interview, Suzanne discusses her book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest and shares her latest research on how Mother Trees recognize and support their kin.

Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Experience “Chapter Four: Futures.”

Photo by Diana Markosian

Julian Hoffman lives in a mountain village beside the Prespa lakes in northwestern Greece. He is the author of The Small Heart of Things and Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save Our Wild Places. In this piece, Julian witnesses the drastic decline of Dalmatian pelicans nesting on the Prespa lakes as they succumb to the recent outbreak of avian influenza. As the wetlands fall strangely quiet, he senses the porous boundaries between our health and that of the ecologies we inhabit.

Photo: Courtesy of the Society for the Protection of Prespa

We close our exploration of the theme of Roots by taking a step into joy. This week, we bring you another piece by birder and writer J. Drew Lanham. In this powerfully recited poem, Drew celebrates the radical act of joy through lifting up liberation, reparations, justice, and deep connection to ancestors and the living world.

Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Three: Roots.”

Photo by Sheila Pree Bright

This three-part 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. This final episode traces the Spanish missions, boarding schools, and ranching empires that drove many Coast Miwok people from their ancestral land in Northern California and shares Theresa Harlan’s continuing grassroots efforts to protect the last standing structures on Tomales Bay built by Coast Miwoks.

Originally released on February 8, 2022.

Photo by Jocelyn Knight

This three-part series is 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. In Episode Two we learn that the Coast Miwok culture predates the geological formation of the San Francisco Bay. In tracing thousands of years of Indigenous presence and history, all the way through the oppressive colonial systems that have become today’s mainstream culture, this episode asks: Who gets to define history?

Originally released on February 1, 2022.

Photo courtesy of Theresa Harlan

Across the United States, Indigenous communities are calling for sweeping revisions to stories commonly told as “history”—stories that, even today, neglect and erase Indigenous peoples and serve as justification for continued ownership of stolen Indigenous lands. This three-part series is the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their ancestral home in Northern California and one woman’s mission to bring the living history of her family back to the land. Throughout this series, Theresa Harlan chronicles the story of her family’s displacement from their homestead on a cove in Tomales Bay and shares her grassroots efforts to involve the wider community in protecting both the history and the future of this place.

As she tells her family’s story, Theresa makes a powerful claim: remembering and retelling inclusive histories has the power to create a more just future. In this series we ask: Who gets to define history? In what ways is it our responsibility to ensure that a shared history is an accurate and just representation of the places we call home?

In Episode 1, Theresa Harlan shares the story of her Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their homestead on a cove in Tomales Bay—an uprooting which ended her family’s time there but did not sever their connection to the ancestral lands and waters of Tamal-liwa.

Originally released on January 25, 2022.

Photo courtesy of Theresa Harlan

How can stories return us to what is essential as we navigate an uncertain future? In this conversation with Amitav Ghosh, author of The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, he calls on storytellers to lead us in the necessary work of collective reimagining—decentering human narratives and re-centering stories of the land.

Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Three: Roots.”

Photo by Sumit Dayal

How do we root ourselves in times of isolation and disorientation? As birder and writer J. Drew Lanham encounters his backyard during the pandemic lockdown, he designates it as a newly sanctioned “wild-like refuge”—a place that is brimming with life as he notices the wildlife that inhabits the nearby faraway.

Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Three: Roots.”

Photo by Sheila Pree Bright

We begin Chapter Three with a story that explores language as a technology capable of transforming our lived realities. As a Native scholar and poet, Jake Skeets considers the necessary interrogation of colonial naming and narratives, and how the Indigenous application of writing as a technology can reshape our world as we move into an unknown future.

Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter Three: Roots.”

Artwork: I Am Everywhere (Sassafras), by Sydney Cain

This sonic journey written and narrated by David G. Haskell brings us to the beginning of sound and song on planet Earth. The experience is made entirely of tiny trembling waves in air, the fugitive, ephemeral energy that we call sound. Spoken words combined with terrestrial sounds invite our senses and imaginations to go outward into an experience of the living Earth and its history. How did the vast and varied chorus of modern sounds—from forest to oceans to human music—emerge from life’s community? When did the living Earth first start to sing? We invite you on a journey into deep time and deep sound that will open your ears and your imagination.

If you enjoy this audio story, check out David’s new companion practice, Playful Listening, which invites you to immerse yourself in the sonic world around you.

Illustration by Daniel Liévano

Daegan Miller is the author of This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent. In this essay, Daegan visits the tree that marks the thousandth westward mile of the Transcontinental Railroad and considers how our historical landmarks have shifted in meaning, leaving us adrift and disoriented in the Anthropocene.

Photo by Brent Mathison