Podcast

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?

The warming of the planet is ushering in changes on a mythological scale. Oceans heat up, ice shelves melt, great floods swallow landscapes, ancient forests are reduced to ash. In this interview from our archive, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason speaks about how such incomprehensible changes are accelerating geological timescales. Instead of playing out over millennia, vast transformations of the Earth are now happening in the span of a lifetime, and in rapid succession. An accompaniment to The Last Ice Age—the third film in our Shifting Landscapes film series—this conversation with Andri explores how we can shift our sense of time to comprehend an uncertain future with greater clarity. Drawing on poetry, memories, stories from his grandparents, and language that infuses meaning into the data-led narrative of the climate crisis, Andri turns to the power of mythology to help us comprehend both the loss and possibility of our moment.

Watch the film The Last Ice Age, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the third in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series.

ChatGPT has divided opinion on how artificial intelligence might shape our future: Is it a harbinger of our demise? Or a friend, arrived just in time to guide us through our collective unraveling? As we entangle ourselves with this technology, are there ways we can use it to transform our intelligence, rather than simply replicating it?

In this week’s essay, writer and adaptive leadership trainer Dana Karout pokes fun at the ways ChatGPT mirrors our own limited ways of thinking. Drawing on her work helping communities navigate conflict and complexity, she pushes us to resist regurgitating what we already know in situations that demand new ways of being. As we try to address the existential challenges mounting around the world—ecological, social, spiritual—could ChatGPT’s empty spiels help us let go of our certainties? What true creativity, what real responses to our moment of crisis, might emerge from our unknowing?

Last week we released Aloha ‘Āina, the second film in our Shifting Landscapes documentary film series, which tells the story of how acclaimed Native Hawaiian poet Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio brought her poetry and love of the land to the forefront of the movement to protect the sacred Mauna Kea from the construction of a thirty-meter telescope.

To complement the film, we’re returning to an investigative story we published several years ago when moves to begin construction first ignited protest at the foot of the mountain. Written by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, this story—rich with the voices and chants of Mauna Kea land protectors—traces the collision of values that continues to play out on the mountain, giving a depth of context to the promise of guardianship maintained by the Kanaka Maoli community.

Watch the film Aloha ‘Āina, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the first in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series.

Although the ecological sphere has long declared the need for a shift in consciousness if we are to survive the myriad crises we’ve ignited, this conversation often lacks examples of what this change in consciousness might be like as a lived, embodied experience.

This week, author of the cult classics The Brothers K and The River Why, David James Duncan, joins the podcast to speak about his new epic novel, Sun House—a story following the journeys of an eclectic collection of characters, each seeking Truth and meaning, who come together to form an unintentional community in rural Montana. David talks about the impetus behind the novel to impart an experiential model of contemplative inner life that might help navigate a future of social, cultural, and ecological unraveling that looms large. Wide-ranging and tender, the conversation explores how the wisdom of the great mystics—from Zen master Dōgen to the thirteenth-century Christian theologian Meister Eckhart and the Beguines—can be relevant in uncovering responses to the crises we face.

This month we released the first film in our new four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series exploring the role of art and the storyteller in our age of ecological crisis. The inspiration for The Nightingale’s Song, which spends time with British folk singer Sam Lee during nightingale season as he joins the bird in mutual song, grew from a special interview we held with Sam in 2021.

To accompany the film, we’re returning to this conversation with Sam, where he shares the story of how the call of the nightingale opened him to a kinship with the more-than-human. Reflecting on how this bird has served as a “wisdom keeper” and “unlocker” of hearts for generations of poets, musicians, and storytellers, he also speaks more about his process of leading audiences into this magical space of communion with the nightingale each spring.

Watch the film The Nightingale’s Song, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the first in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series.

In this conversation, held in May at the Architectural Association in London, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee and architect, artist, and journalist Marko Milovanovic talk about Time, our fifth annual print edition, and our exploration of the mystery that lies beyond our humancentric notions of Time. Ranging from the kinds of time that can bring us back into relationship with the living world, to the mystical Sufi poet Rumi, and the impulses shaping our print editions, this talk explores the vision behind Emergence to help reweave the worlds of ecology, culture, and spirituality, and once again understand the Earth is alive, animate, and sacred.

In this conversation from our Shifting Landscapes exhibition, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is joined by Marshmallow Laser Feast creative director Ersin Han Ersin, one of the artists behind the exhibition’s large-scale installation, Breathing with the Forest, which invites you into an experience of exchanging breath with a forest in the Colombian Amazon. Talking about the ways MLF’s projects bring together science and imagination to illuminate the hidden connections within the living world, Ersin speaks to the power of sensory engagement, wonder, and awe to broaden our perception of more-than-human experiences.

Explore our special online adaptation of Breathing with the Forest.

When we step into a forest aware and listening to what surrounds us—remembering that the living world is just as aware of our presence—a relationship of reciprocity can take root. How might such a quality of attention change our ability to see, feel, and give ourselves to the landscapes around us? In this audio practice, writer and certified nature and forest therapy guide Kimberly Ruffin takes us on a sensory walk to meet the soil, sky, smells, and sounds of the forest. Encouraging us to “be a part of the music of a place,” this practice beckons us to witness, and be witnessed by, the living world.

How would our response to the ecological crisis be different if we understood that our own consciousness is as wild as the breathing Earth around us? In this conversation, poet, translator, and author David Hinton reaches back to a time when cultures were built around a reverence for the Earth and proposes that the sixth extinction we now face is rooted in philosophical assumptions about our separation from the living world. Urging us to reweave mind and landscape, he offers an ethics tempered by love and kinship as a way to navigate our era of disconnection.

How did the vast and varied chorus of modern sounds—from forests to oceans to human music—emerge from within life’s community? When did the living Earth first start to sing? In this immersive sonic journey, biologist and acclaimed author David George Haskell opens our senses to unexplored auditory landscapes through spoken words and terrestrial sounds, tuning our ears to the tiny, trembling waves of sound all around us. Hearing three billion years of our planet’s sound evolution in the trills, bugles, clicks, and pulses of the life around him, David invites us into the space of connection with deep time and the more-than-human world that opens when we tune in to the Earth’s orchestra.

If you enjoy this audio story, check out David’s companion practice, Playful Listening, which invites you to immerse yourself in the sonic world around you. And listen to our interview with David, “Listening and the Crisis of Inattention.”

Equipped with his binaural microphone system, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton has spent the last forty years traveling the world documenting the sounds of the Earth and its inhabitants. Recording the noise pollution that permeates nearly all places on the planet, Gordon also listens for silence, for the sounds that emerge in the absence of noise. This week, we return to our audio adaptation of our virtual reality experience Sanctuaries of Silence—one of the first stories we released back in 2018. Guided by Gordon, we embark into the Hoh Rain Forest, one of the quietest places in North America. As he attunes our ears to its silence, we begin to hear the music of life emerge in every direction—the murmur of the river, the shuffle of trees, the cacophony of birdsong. We recommend putting on headphones for this one, so you can have the best listening experience.

How can we repair our connection with what we eat, rejoining the biological web that we are a part of? In this conversation, fermentation expert Sandor Katz unpacks his book Fermentation as Metaphor, guiding us through the lessons taught by microorganisms as they change form. Exploring how our fear of the other, the unseen, and the unknowable has divorced us from the wonder of fermentation, Sandor shows us how engaging with microbial communities through food—breads, fungi, pickles, yogurts—can bring us into relationship with the tiny but vital unseen forces of the living world.

What becomes possible, especially in the face of crisis, when we orient our consciousness towards uncertainty, emptiness, and a sense of relationship with the world beyond the self? In this week’s conversation, Australian writer and Zen teacher Susan Murphy Roshi immerses us in the tradition of Zen koan and its ability to shift our consciousness amid crisis. Delving into the power of the not-knowing mind, Susan presents koan as a gateway to truly connecting with the world around us, and speaks to how we must respond to our moment of suffering from a place of openness if we are to remember our seamlessness with all of creation.

Spending time with a landscape opens us to the language it speaks. Can we quiet our own voices enough to hear what the Earth has to say? This week, Jenny Odell takes us on a walk through the folds and furrows of her Oakland neighborhood, listening for the memories embedded in the shape of her surroundings. Sensing the language of her local terrain, she begins to tune in to the age-old conversation between rock and water. By cultivating this sustained attention, Jenny shows how we can ask a place, as we would a person, what is your story?