Emergence Magazine Podcast

Emergence Magazine is an award-winning magazine exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture and spirituality. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, author-narrated essays, fiction, multipart series, and more. We feature new podcast episodes weekly on Tuesdays.

Society & Culture
Religion & Spirituality
Spirituality
101
The Stories I Haven’t Been Told – Jamie Figueroa
Jamie Figueroa brings her pen to the blank pages of her family’s history, navigating generational trauma and lost ancestral stories in order to reveal and reclaim her cultural and familial inheritance.
50 min
102
Be Dammed – Laia Jufresa
Stranded with a group of survivors in an endless line of boats waiting to cross a border, one woman is tasked with holding prayers for the community’s salvation.
32 min
103
Portholes – Anna Badkhen
Anna Badkhen traces markers left in the Earth from the near and distant past, unspooling the narratives that thread through the imprints we leave on the planet, and what they foretell for the future.
31 min
104
They Carry Us With Them: The Great Tree Migrati...
Around the world, scores of species of trees are moving north, or west, or upslope. What is at stake as the forests change around us? Experience four stories of tree migration.
49 min
105
Ravens and Doves – Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Jul...
In the face of present-day environmental catastrophe and social injustice, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates examine the opposing narratives of survival in the story of Noah’s Ark.
40 min
106
The Place by the Sea – Masatsugu Ono
In this short story by Masatsugu Ono and translated by Sam Malissa, a woman and her young son move to an abandoned village along Japan's eastern coast, where a typhoon begins to gather around them.
50 min
107
Look Closely, or You’ll Miss It – Natalie Rose ...
With the help of a historian, ornithologist, and birds themselves, Natalie Rose Richardson begins to embody a new quality of attention as she follows a migration path from Chicago to South Carolina.
35 min
108
Antarctica the Woman – Stephanie Krzywonos
Stephanie Krzywonos interrogates heroic narratives of Antarctica that gender the land through feminine tropes. As she comes to know this expansive landscape, she invites us to consider the continent on its own terms.
40 min
109
A Whale in the Desert: Tracing Paths of Migrati...
Tristan McConnell journeys across Turkana in Kenya’s Rift Valley, a place whose long story is still being written by a shape-shifting landscape and changing patterns of human and nonhuman migration.
53 min
110
Stepping into the Liminal – A Talk by Emmanuel ...
Offering a frame for how we might navigate our current moment of transition and transformation, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee urges us to recognize the liminal—the space between worlds—as an invitation to step into new ways of being.
42 min
111
Speaking Wind-Words – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
On a visit to a nature preserve in Nebraska’s Sandhills, Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder traces the transformation of the Great Plains to the widespread belief in “manifest destiny” and weighs the power of words to shape landscapes.
78 min
112
Animals in the Room: Why We Can and Should List...
Listening closely for what her nonhuman neighbors are communicating, Melanie Challenger considers what it would take to expand the democratic imagination to include and represent animal voices in the decisions that affect them.
40 min
113
Ancestral Structures on the Trailing Edge – Lau...
Geologist-writer Lauret E. Savoy unearths the physical and social forces that have shaped America’s Chesapeake region, surfacing ancient tectonic movements alongside the deliberate construction of race in colonial America.
39 min
114
Thylacine – Lydia Millet
In this short story, Lydia Millet explores the loss of extinction as a man seeks the company and friendship of the last Tasmanian tiger, housed in a failing zoo.
25 min
115
When the Earth Started to Sing – David G. Haskell
This sonic journey written and narrated by David G. Haskell brings us to the beginning of sound and song on planet Earth.
41 min
116
The Butchering – Jake Skeets
Summoning the experiences that have shaped his relationship with food and nourishment, Diné poet Jake Skeets puts forth story as a pathway to food sovereignty.
31 min
117
Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves – J. Drew ...
In this poem, J. Drew Lanham celebrates radical acts of joy by lifting up liberation, reparations, justice, and deep connection to ancestors and the living world.
13 min
118
Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet – D...
Cultural ecologist David Abram reflects on the deep intelligence that guides migrating animals across the wider body of the Earth, presented with “Wandering Within,” a new series of drawings by Katie Holten.
53 min
119
Hidden Bayou – Nathaniel Rich.
In southern Louisiana, an actuary-turned-field-biologist begins to notice strange occurrences in the uncanny landscape of Nieux Swamp, a man-made climate mitigation project funded by a multibillion-dollar corporation.
51 min
120
Becoming Water: Black Memory in Slavery’s After...
Navigating Black lineages of thinking and practice, Makshya Tolbert wades into the liminal space that exists between water and Black memory.
23 min
121
Saguaro, Free of the Earth – Boyce Upholt
In this essay from Boyce Upholt, a coalition of Indigenous voices speak on behalf of the rooted beings of the desert as legal protections for the saguaro cactus come up against the push to build a border wall.
41 min
122
In the Shifting Embrace of the Ganga – Arati Ku...
During monsoon season, Arati Kumar-Rao returns to visit the ancient, deified Ganga—and the communities who live along her shifting banks. There she witnesses both the life-giving benevolence and devastating waywardness of the river.
55 min
123
Dwelling on Earth – Jay Griffiths
Marveling at worms, fungi, and ancient water bears, Jay Griffiths brings our attention to what dwells beneath our feet.
38 min
124
The Inward Migration in Apocalyptic Times – Ale...
As the world falters, threatening native ecosystems and Indigenous lifeways, Australian Aboriginal author Alexis Wright turns inward to the dwelling place of ancestral story.
42 min
125
Another Kind of Time – a conversation with Jenn...
In this sweeping interview, Jenny Odell, artist and author of “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock,” invites us to embrace ways of relating to time that are tuned to the rhythms and patterns of the Earth.
63 min