Podcast

We’re featuring this episode from our Language Keepers podcast series in honor of Marie Wilcox, the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language and the creator of the first and only Wukchumni dictionary. On Saturday, September 25, 2021, Marie passed away at the age of 87. Marie was a remarkable woman who was deeply committed to her family, to the Wukchumni language, and to the Native language revitalization movement. She worked tirelessly for years to ensure the survival of her language, an effort that will serve her family and community for generations to come.

Photo by Paul Adams

Jack Dash and Luke Swenson are the creators of Atascosa Borderlands, a visual storytelling project combining botanical survey, oral history, and documentary photography to explore the Atascosa Highlands: an ecological crossroads that straddles the US and Mexico border in the Sonoran Desert. This piece documents Jack and Luke’s recent visit to the Highlands, where ancient populations of silverleaf oak, saguaro, and sweet acacia grow with no sense that the land around them is divided. But as the border wall imposes a hard boundary, this island of biodiversity faces an increasingly fragmented future.

Photo by Luke Swenson

Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian, specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. In this essay, she observes riverbanks collapsing from the melting permafrost while on a moose hunt north of the Arctic Circle—evidence of the fraught story of the Anthropocene that has marked this changing landscape. As she and a friend from the Gwitchin community of Old Crow travel down the Ch’izhìn Nji, two contrasting narratives unfold along the riverbanks: one of conquest, another of quiet knowing and restraint.

Illustration by Sarah Gilman

A favorite interview from our archives: Emergence Executive Editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee spoke with acclaimed British writer Robert Macfarlane in 2019 as part of our language-themed issue. Their conversation explores the lyrical relationship between language and landscapes, and the consequence, responsibility, and pleasure of naming the living world.

Photo by Bryan Appleyard

Charles Foster is a writer, barrister, and traveler. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide and The Screaming Sky. In this essay, Charles considers his role as a writer seeking to experience and express communion with the more-than-human world, and begins to wonder if language can do anything other than constrain and tame the tangled wild.

Illustration by Daniel Liévano

Natalie Rose Richardson is a poet and writer who was born in New York City to a long line of border-crossers and proud people of blended heritage. In this essay, Natalie searches for her great-grandfather’s grave in a historically segregated cemetery and confronts the American notion of paradise as an ideology which imposes walls of separation onto the multilayered landscape—allowing some in and keeping others out.

Illustration by Jamiel Law

J. Drew Lanham is a birder, naturalist, and hunter-conservationist. He is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. In this powerful reading, Drew recites his poem Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves, a celebration of the radical act of joy through lifting up liberation, reparations, justice, and deep connection to ancestors and the living world.

Illustration by Diana Ejaita

Stephen Lezak is a PhD Candidate in the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. His work focuses on the politics of climate change in the context of communities and landscapes in the North American Arctic. In this essay, Stephen explores the paradoxical human narratives that overlay the Arctic landscape—a frontier, a paradise, a marker of our destruction of the planet—as he bears witness to a place that is teetering in an uneasy balance between eternity and loss.

Illustration by Isabel Seliger

As the pandemic begins to ebb and we begin to emerge from a difficult and transformative year, we are taking a moment to pause as the warmth of summer and the cool shade of trees—here in the Northern Hemisphere—beckons to us. Kimberly Ruffin is a Certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide and author of Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions. As a companion to Kimberly’s past Emergence essay “Bodies of Evidence,” she created a guided practice of walking through the forest. For Kimberly, faith is a continuous exchange of belonging, an experience that’s palpable among trees.

Gina Rae La Cerva is a geographer, environmental anthropologist, and the author of Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food. In this essay, Gina Rae revisits her grandfather’s recipes in order to trace the elements of her Sicilian heritage. Through legacies of wild food gathering and feasting, she seeks to embody the traditions that have brought her family joy and sustenance, even in times of grief, conquest, and migration.

Photo by Studio Airport

Nick Hunt is a writer, journalist, and storyteller, and the author of Walking the Woods and the Water and Where the Wild Winds Are. In this essay, Nick ventures into the Forest of Dean, an ancient mixed woodland, where he searches for the unruly, twilight realm of the boar—a creature who brings him to the boundary between wildness and civilization, history and myth.

Illustration by Henry McCausland