Podcast

In this episode, climate journalist Zoë Schlanger speaks about her book The Light Eaters and explores what it might mean if we embraced plant intelligence within the frame of Western science. She shares a smorgasbord of new findings around the capabilities of plants—from roots that can sense the sound of running water to flowers memorizing the timing of pollinators’ visits—and wonders how a growing awareness of more-than-human intelligence can upend the structures and hierarchies we have placed around living beings, ourselves included. Talking about the politics of language in the field of botany, shedding her own plant blindness, and how we can widen our scientific imaginations to perceive intelligence in beings without brains, Zoë probes what it will take for us to let plants into the realm of our ethical consideration.

In this conversation, Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer celebrates the serviceberry—both as a plant of joyous generosity, and as a living model for a gift economy that recognizes the sacred nature of the Earth. Delving into her latest book, which elaborates on an essay she wrote for us in 2020, Robin speaks about how a sense of “enoughness” can radically shift our habits of consumption; and how the ethical and pragmatic principles of the Honorable Harvest can invite us to honor a currency of relationship over a currency of money, helping us embody a practical reverence for the Earth and Her abundance.

Read Robin’s essay from 2020, “The Serviceberry.”

In this narrated essay, writer Robert Moor journeys to Haida Gwaii, an island chain in British Columbia, for the anniversary of a historic agreement between the Haida Nation and the Canadian government that protects the landscape’s last remaining old-growth forests after decades of logging. As he walks through forest stewarded for generations by Haida, Robert begins to see the tangle of Sitka spruces and cedars, mosses and lichens, not as a site of slow decay, but of ongoing growth. How can being in the presence of ancient trees, he asks, help us feel, rather than intellectualize, not only the deep past, but also our responsibility to the future?

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

The Earth has a story that far precedes ours. Before we arrived on the scene, the Earth was already ancient beyond belief, shaped and reshaped by tectonic upheavals, climate changes, and mass extinctions—an evolution She has meticulously archived in the strata and sediment beneath our feet. In this narrated essay, author and geologist Marcia Bjornerud orients us to read these many-volume memoirs of our planet. Celebrating the deep time-fulness of Earth—the four billion years of dynamism that have made this moment possible—she wonders what might happen to our understanding of the past and the present if we remembered the stories that came before our humancentric one.

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

Our inner and outer worlds, while constantly changing, feed into each other, mirror each other, and both carry an imprint of what is eternal. In this narrated essay, author and Sufi mystic Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee shows us how the sacred dimension of time, where the linear is absent, can lead us inwards to silence and emptiness; and outwards, towards a pure sensory awareness of the sights, sounds, and rhythms of the Earth. Sharing that time and timelessness “are not separate but part of a living structure that includes a mayfly that lives for a day and a thousand-year-old sequoia,” Llewellyn calls us to regain a relationship with time beyond numbers and schedules; to remember that time belongs to the deeper patterns of life.

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

Jane Hirshfield’s poetry is both mystical and deeply rooted in physical life, opening our eyes and hearts to what lies at the periphery—what is both ordinary and invisible amid the clamor of modern life—and reorienting us to engage from a space of wonder. In this expansive conversation, Jane recites several of her poems, including “Time Thinks of Time,” from our fifth print edition. Drawing on a lifelong relationship with Zen, she speaks about how a profoundly felt intimacy between self and world can recalibrate our ethics, helping us find both humility and an inner spaciousness that can lead us towards being in service to the Earth.

Read Jane’s poem “Time Thinks of Time.”

This third and final talk from a series by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee weaves together ideas from the previous two, exploring how time and place, love and kinship, the cycles and rhythms of creation, all flow in concert as an expression of the Earth. Offering a way to understand Earth Time through the principles and practices of spiritual ecology, Emmanuel speaks to how we might let go of mechanized time by connecting our inner and outer senses with the cycles that live and spin around and within us. When we reorient ourselves to be in relationship with the essential rhythms of life, we can come to know time as an animate, alive, and sacred expression of the love that runs through all things.

Find out more about our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

Through the concept of “space-time” we can understand how the movement of time is fused with physical space into a continuum. But what are the nuances of this relationship, in which time imprints place with meaning, and vice versa? This week’s podcast is the second of three talks given at our Remembering Earth Time retreat earlier this year in Devon, England. Picking up the thread laid out in the previous talk on working with the love that runs through time, Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks about how the intimate relationship between time and place, expressed through the cycles ever-present in our landscapes, can help us form ties of kinship with the Earth. When time becomes rooted rather than abstract, he says, we can once again find ourselves a participant in the mystery and magic of creation.

Find out more about our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

In this first talk in a series that brings together many of the themes explored in our latest print edition, Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee offers a way to re-attune our sense of time to be in relationship with the cycles of the Earth—from the deep time movement of mountains, to the fleeting bloom and decay of cherry blossom. While we have stripped time down to a single expression, forgetting the axis of love that runs through it, Emmanuel talks about how inner cycles of breath and heartbeat can return us to a more expansive story of time in which spirit and matter are once again braided together.

Find out more about our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

Released this week, the final film in our Shifting Landscapes documentary film series, Taste of the Land, tells the story of Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam’s search for a spiritual relationship with her homeland. In this companion essay by Kalyanee, she delves deeper into her experiences of cheate—the Khmer word for “taste”—and how she came to understand that to truly know the essence of the land, one must know its taste. Tracing her life back to its very beginnings, she shares her first “land-taste”—the sweet flavor of Battambang oranges—and the many tastes that came after that slowly deepened the yearning in her heart to truly know the soils, waters, mountains, people, and plants of Cambodia. As she reflects on the spiritual fallout of her family’s severed relationship with their homeland, she also contemplates the essential connection that was kept alive through stories, language, and food shared by her parents.

Watch the feature film Taste of the Land, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the fourth in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series.

In his book The Nutmeg’s Curse, scholar Amitav Ghosh writes, “the planet will never come alive for you unless your songs and stories give life to all the beings seen and unseen that inhabit a living Earth,”—seeding a shift in consciousness begins with the stories we tell. In this wide-ranging interview from our archives, Amitav explores the themes of his recent work, including the insidious philosophy that the Earth is inert and how this belief paved the way for the implementation of violent projects around the globe, such as the genocide of Indigenous people and the monolith of capitalism. Unpacking the rise and legacy of an ideology of mastery, Amitav asks, if such conquests were made possible by the narrative of an inanimate Earth, what stories can now be imagined to help us recognize the world as sacred and alive?

How can we learn to be with the grief that arises within as we witness the destruction being wrought upon the Earth? When we are broken open by the pain of loss, how can we hold and work with the seeds of despair, but also love, that flood into that space? This week, we revisit “Thylacine,” a short story by American novelist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet that imagines the twilight of the last remaining Tasmanian tiger, a creature caught in the crosshairs of Australia’s violent colonization. As a man mourns the death of his mother, he seeks the company of the tiger housed in a failing zoo. Turning to face the loss that begins to swell through the zoo like a plague, he summons the courage to care for what remains amid an overwhelming sorrow for what will inevitably disappear.

In December last year, Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam’s short film Lost World screened at our Shifting Landscapes exhibition in London. Kalyanee’s films tenderly document the changing cultural and ecological landscapes of her homeland, and in Lost World she shares the story of a community in Koh Sralau whose livelihoods are threatened as the mangrove forests they depend on are ruthlessly mined for sand to build an “eco-park” in Singapore. In this conversation, recorded live at the exhibition, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks with Kalyanee about her years-long process of creating the film, and the intimate relationships she holds with people and land that allow her to tell powerful, and often heartbreaking, stories of changing landscapes from a place of humility and connection.

Watch Kalyanee’s short film Lost World and read her companion essay

This talk was a keynote given by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee during a conference on spiritual ecology and peace building at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in July. It explores how spiritual ecology is fundamentally a memory of living in kinship with the Earth that must be reawakened if we are to embody a spiritual connection with the living world. Turning to praise and prayer, and the many forms they take, as ways to return to this sacred relationship, Emmanuel calls us to sweep the dust of our forgetfulness and hold the Earth in our hearts with love.

This short story, written by Andri Snær Magnason for our third print edition, follows an architect in Reykjavík grappling with the growing discord between his creativity and a capitalist reality. Laying bare the ways narratives of control and human supremacy can manifest in the physical objects we make, “Giantstone” asks us to consider what new stories could begin to shape our inner and outer worlds. Will we remain stuck in our humancentric philosophies, or will our art come to reflect a way of life that keeps and cares for the Earth?