Emergence Magazine Podcast

By Emergence Magazine

Society & Culture Natural Sciences Religion & Spirituality Spirituality

What's Emergence Magazine Podcast about?

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.

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Emergence Magazine Podcast episodes:

04.23.2024
When the Earth Started to Sing – David G. Haskell
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...
04.16.2024
Sanctuaries of Silence - A Listening Journey
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,...
04.09.2024
Fermentation as Metaphor - A Conversation with Sandor Katz
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...
04.02.2024
Earth as Koan, Earth as Self – A Conversation with Susan Murphy Roshi
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...
03.26.2024
Reading the Rocks – Jenny Odell
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...
03.19.2024
Holy Terroir: Finding Taste in an Edge-Place – Lily Kelting
How do we taste a landscape? In this narrated essay, food and culture scholar Lily Kelting immerses us in the sounds of construction, the presence of buffalo, and the fragrance of marigold, smoke, and trash that flavor the outskirts of...
03.12.2024
Enraptured with Earth – Two talks by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
At our Shifting Landscapes retreat held at Sharpham Trust in Devon last summer, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee gave two talks that invite us to once again fall in love with the Earth. Feeling strongly that in this time of ecological unraveling...
03.05.2024
Chasing Cicadas – Anisa George
In anticipation of this year’s massive cicada emergence, we revisit a story from Anisa George, where she calls us into the wonder of encountering these tiny messengers. Immersing us in the sound—the buzzing, whirring, and clicking—of cicadas, this story invites...
02.27.2024
Finding Joy in the Unknown – A Conversation with Dara McAnulty
Envisioning a future colored by a worsening ecological crisis makes for a despairing picture, but how can we find ways to keep our hearts open amid destruction? How can we express an authentic love for the living world in ways...
02.20.2024
Deep Time Diligence – An Interview with Tyson Yunkaporta
What would it mean to operate from a place of deep time diligence? In this conversation, Tyson Yunkaporta, an Aboriginal scholar and author who belongs to the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland, speaks with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee about deep-time thinking...
02.13.2024
Mycelial Landscapes – A Conversation with Merlin Sheldrake and Barney Steel
Recorded live at our Shifting Landscapes exhibition in London last December, this conversation between Emergence Magazine executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, renowned mycologist and author Merlin Sheldrake, and Marshmallow Laser Feast creative director Barney Steel—who was behind the exhibition’s large-scale installation...
02.06.2024
Glacial Longings – Elizabeth Rush
Taking us to the collapsing face of Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, author Elizabeth Rush works to free the ice’s agency from both historical tropes and the confines of her own preconceptions. Contemplating the ways our own future is increasingly entangled...
01.30.2024
Seeds of Reciprocity – A Panel Discussion with Kalyanee Mam, Joycelyn Longdon, and Sam Lee, moderated by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
Held at our Shifting Landscapes exhibition in December last year, this panel discussion, moderated by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, brought together environmental justice activist and Climate in Colour founder Joycelyn Longdon, award-winning Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam, and folk singer, song collector, and...
01.23.2024
Widening Circles – a conversation with Joanna Macy
From her first experiences of heart connection with the living world on her grandfather’s farm in upstate New York to her antinuclear activism in the late 1960s and her ongoing work with deep ecology, ecophilosopher and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy...
01.16.2024
An Offering of Remembrance – a talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
We have forgotten the covenant of primordial love and reciprocal care with the Earth that existed from the beginning in favor of a story that casts humans as the center of the cosmos. As the fallout of this narrative culminates...
01.09.2024
A Path Older Than Memory – a conversation with Paul Salopek
In this conversation, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Paul Salopek, who is a decade into a remarkable journey retracing, on foot, the migration pathway taken by the first humans out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago. Speaking...
01.02.2024
Valemon The Bear: Myth in the Age of the Anthropocene – featuring Martin Shaw
In an audio adaptation of our multimedia experience “Valemon the Bear: Myth in the Age of the Anthropocene,” mythologist Martin Shaw takes us on a journey to the deepest parts of ourselves. Summoning the ancient tale of a wild daughter...
12.19.2023
Be Earth Now – Rainer Maria Rilke recited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
In our final podcast of the year, a special selection of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry offers nourishment for heart and spirit. Twenty-five years ago, Buddhist scholar and eco-philosopher Joanna Macy collaborated with award-winning poet Anita Burrows to translate Rilke’s seminal...
12.12.2023
Sanctuary – Camille T. Dungy
Witnessing the cry of the Earth, in its myriad permutations, can evoke real responses of grief and deep love for the planet. As we begin to acknowledge the wounds we’ve inflicted upon our nonhuman kin, how can tender connections with...
12.05.2023
And Peace Shall Return — Ben Okri
In this short story, Booker Prize–winning Nigerian author and poet Ben Okri envisions the tragedy and peace of a post-human world. Twenty thousand years into the future, an exploration of Earth uncovers the final notes and unfinished stories left by...
11.28.2023
An Ecological Technology – a conversation with James Bridle
Interrogating where AI models originate from and who they serve, writer, artist, and technologist James Bridle questions our fundamental assumptions about intelligence in this expansive interview. Acknowledging the correlation between our narrow definition of intelligence and what our technologies look...
11.21.2023
Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System – Robin Wall Kimmerer
In one of our favorite stories, “Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System,” Potawatomi mother, scientist, and professor Robin Wall Kimmerer takes us through the nine-thousand-year existence of maize, reflecting on the ancient circle of reciprocity that links humans and...
11.14.2023
When You Could Hear the Trees – Kerri ní Dochartaigh
In this narrated essay, Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s experiences of pregnancy and motherhood bring her into an emerging realization of her own mammalhood. When she encounters her animal self, deeply embedded in the ecosystems around her, it transforms everything: her sense...
11.07.2023
The Stories I Haven’t Been Told – Jamie Figueroa
How do our inheritances shape our lives? In this week’s narrated essay, Afro-Taína author Jamie Figueroa brings her pen to the erased and fragmented pages of her family’s history, exploring writing as a tool of revelation and reclamation amid a...
10.31.2023
Be Dammed – Laia Jufresa
This week, we share a short story by Mexican author Laia Jufresa, translated by Sophie Hughes, that imagines the chaos of a world ravaged and divided by climate change. In “Be Dammed,” thousands of climate refugees find themselves forming settlements...
10.24.2023
Portholes – Anna Badkhen
What can we learn from imprints in the earth about the ancient presences that left them behind? Acclaimed author Anna Badkhen traces markers left in the earth from the near and distant past, from the buffalo wallows of North America...
10.17.2023
They Carry Us With Them: The Great Tree Migration – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
This week, we’ve adapted the interactive multimedia feature “They Carry Us With Them: The Great Tree Migration” for our podcast. Written by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, this story delves into changing patterns of tree migration in Maine, tracing the threats faced by...
10.10.2023
Ravens and Doves – Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates
In light of the intensifying climate crises we face today, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates examine the opposing narratives of survival embodied by two birds in perhaps the most abiding of all Flood myths—Noah’s Ark. Questioning the dove's familiar...
10.03.2023
The Place by the Sea – Masatsugu Ono
In this short story by Japanese author Masatsugu Ono, translated and narrated by Sam Malissa, a woman and her young son move to an abandoned seaside village along Japan’s eastern coast, where they’re met by the well-meaning attention of its...
09.26.2023
Look Closely, or You’ll Miss It – Natalie Rose Richardson
In this week’s essay, Natalie Rose Richardson begins to experience a quality of attention that birdwatching can cultivate. Learning from Chicago historian Sherry Williams, who has piloted programs exploring the relationship between bird migration and the Great Migration, and J....
09.19.2023
Antarctica the Woman – Stephanie Krzywonos
Visiting the Ross Ice Shelf across several seasons, Stephanie Kryzwonos interrogates the heroic narratives of male exploration and conquest—written almost entirely by white men—that gender the land through feminine tropes. Might these characterizations, borne of a colonizing hunger to conquer...
09.12.2023
A Whale in the Desert: Tracing Paths of Migration in Turkana – Tristan McConnell
In a world rapidly spiraling into climate turmoil, will we reorient to welcome migration not only as a right, but a necessary human adaptation? In this week’s essay, writer Tristan McConnell ventures across Turkana in northwest Kenya, home of the...
09.05.2023
Stepping into the Liminal – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
When we are both left with the fragments of a dying world and given glimpses of an emerging one; when there is so much beauty and destruction to be witnessed, how can we find our bearings? In this talk, given...
08.29.2023
Speaking Wind-Words – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
How do words shape our world? In this week’s narrated essay, writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder visits the wind-sculpted dunes of Nebraska’s Sandhills, considering the prophecies that collided across the American Great Plains in the nineteenth century. Tracing the histories of violence,...
08.22.2023
Animals in the Room: Why We Can and Should Listen to Other Species – Melanie Challenger
How might our human systems work differently if they were adapted to receive input from the nonhuman creatures they involve and impact? In this week’s narrated essay, writer and ethicist Melanie Challenger considers what it would take to expand the...
08.15.2023
Ancestral Structures on the Trailing Edge – Lauret E. Savoy
Histories are enduring presences. No matter how deeply they are buried, they remain. In this week’s narrated essay, author Lauret E. Savoy meditates on the history of the Chesapeake region and the vestiges of collision and rupture that continue to...
08.08.2023
Thylacine – Lydia Millet
As rapid warming, pollution, habitat destruction, and insidious violence against other species speeds up the rate of extinction and edges ecosystems ever-closer to collapse, what voids are left in the tapestry of the living world? In this short story, novelist...
08.01.2023
When the Earth Started to Sing – David G. Haskell
In this audio experience by biologist and acclaimed author David George Haskell, we are invited to be attentive to the songs and stories that thrum in the air around us. Hearing three billion years of our planet’s sound evolution—a lineage...
06.27.2023
The Butchering – Jake Skeets
In this story, Diné poet and author Jake Skeets honors the food traditions that have sustained his people since time immemorial. As he prepares to butcher a sheep for Kinaałda, a Diné puberty ceremony of family and song, Jake contemplates...
06.20.2023
Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves – J. Drew Lanham
“Joy is our lives mattering, / Blackness respected.” Juneteenth is a day to celebrate and defend freedom, equity, and belonging for Black Americans. In this stirring reading of his poem “Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves,” poet, birder, and naturalist...
06.13.2023
Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet – David Abram
In this week’s narrated essay, cultural ecologist and geophilosopher David Abram conjures the impossible movements of Alaskan salmon, sandhill cranes, and monarch butterflies on their annual migrations, marveling at the reciprocal interactions that guide these creatures across the wider body...
06.06.2023
Hidden Bayou – Nathaniel Rich.
“Did Nieux Swamp resemble the original deltaic marsh, before it had been ruined by sea level rise, shipping canals, and pipelines? Or had the Foundation’s engineers created an alien landscape?” This week, acclaimed author Nathaniel Rich invites us to step into...
05.30.2023
Becoming Water: Black Memory in Slavery’s Afterlives – Makshya Tolbert
As our physical and cultural landscapes transform around us, what memories remain held by water? What histories of pain and destruction, what hallowed moments are carried in its currents, taken into its body like shards of glass, and resurface to...
05.23.2023
Saguaro, Free of the Earth – Boyce Upholt
Imagine a world where the mountains and glaciers, trees and waterways and animals—everything comprising our living, breathing planet—had as much a right to exist, legally, as humans. In this narrated essay, author Boyce Upholt travels to meet with the O’odham...
05.16.2023
In the Shifting Embrace of the Ganga – Arati Kumar-Rao
Visiting West Bengal during monsoon season, writer and photographer Arati Kumar-Rao bears witness to all that is formed and all that is destroyed in the swell and retreat of the Ganga. Struck by the immense power of the ancient river—a...
05.09.2023
Dwelling on Earth – Jay Griffiths
Soil has been described as the skin of the living world—vital, reactive, fragile and thin. Like our own skin, soil contains and protects a living, interdependent ecosystem that breathes, digests, and is finite in its ability to revitalize itself when...
05.02.2023
The Inward Migration in Apocalyptic Times – Alexis Wright
With native ecosystems and Indigenous lifeways perpetually under threat, acclaimed Australian Aboriginal author Alexis Wright considers how her enduring culture has responded to ongoing destruction. She turns inward to the dwelling place of ancestral story, to a space where the...
04.25.2023
Another Kind of Time – a conversation with Jenny Odell
How we experience time is, ultimately, how we experience our lives. In this conversation with Jenny Odell, artist and author of Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, she describes the social and cultural ideas that underpin our sense...
04.18.2023
The Nightingale's Song – a conversation with Sam Lee
To mark the beginning of England’s nightingale season, we revisit our conversation with acclaimed folk singer, conservationist, and song collector Sam Lee, who steps into the forest each spring to sing with these beloved birds. In this interview, Sam reflects...
04.11.2023
A Woman Meets an Owl, a Rattlesnake, and a Hummingbird – Greg Sarris
In this week’s podcast, Tribal Chairman and award-winning author Greg Sarris introduces us to the Crow Sisters, who tell of a young woman drawn on a mysterious journey to the lost village of Kobe·cha, near Sonoma Mountain in Northern California....

What's Emergence Magazine Podcast about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Emergence Magazine Podcast episodes:

When the Earth Started to Sing – David G. Haskell

Sanctuaries of Silence - A Listening Journey

Fermentation as Metaphor - A Conversation with Sandor Katz

Earth as Koan, Earth as Self – A Conversation with Susan Murphy Roshi

Reading the Rocks – Jenny Odell

Holy Terroir: Finding Taste in an Edge-Place – Lily Kelting

Enraptured with Earth – Two talks by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Chasing Cicadas – Anisa George

Finding Joy in the Unknown – A Conversation with Dara McAnulty

Deep Time Diligence – An Interview with Tyson Yunkaporta

Mycelial Landscapes – A Conversation with Merlin Sheldrake and Barney Steel

Glacial Longings – Elizabeth Rush

Seeds of Reciprocity – A Panel Discussion with Kalyanee Mam, Joycelyn Longdon, and Sam Lee, moderated by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Widening Circles – a conversation with Joanna Macy

An Offering of Remembrance – a talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

A Path Older Than Memory – a conversation with Paul Salopek

Valemon The Bear: Myth in the Age of the Anthropocene – featuring Martin Shaw

Be Earth Now – Rainer Maria Rilke recited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

Sanctuary – Camille T. Dungy

And Peace Shall Return — Ben Okri

An Ecological Technology – a conversation with James Bridle

Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System – Robin Wall Kimmerer

When You Could Hear the Trees – Kerri ní Dochartaigh

The Stories I Haven’t Been Told – Jamie Figueroa

Be Dammed – Laia Jufresa

Portholes – Anna Badkhen

They Carry Us With Them: The Great Tree Migration – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

Ravens and Doves – Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates

The Place by the Sea – Masatsugu Ono

Look Closely, or You’ll Miss It – Natalie Rose Richardson

Antarctica the Woman – Stephanie Krzywonos

A Whale in the Desert: Tracing Paths of Migration in Turkana – Tristan McConnell

Stepping into the Liminal – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Speaking Wind-Words – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

Animals in the Room: Why We Can and Should Listen to Other Species – Melanie Challenger

Ancestral Structures on the Trailing Edge – Lauret E. Savoy

Thylacine – Lydia Millet

When the Earth Started to Sing – David G. Haskell

The Butchering – Jake Skeets

Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves – J. Drew Lanham

Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet – David Abram

Hidden Bayou – Nathaniel Rich.

Becoming Water: Black Memory in Slavery’s Afterlives – Makshya Tolbert

Saguaro, Free of the Earth – Boyce Upholt

In the Shifting Embrace of the Ganga – Arati Kumar-Rao

Dwelling on Earth – Jay Griffiths

The Inward Migration in Apocalyptic Times – Alexis Wright

Another Kind of Time – a conversation with Jenny Odell

The Nightingale's Song – a conversation with Sam Lee

A Woman Meets an Owl, a Rattlesnake, and a Hummingbird – Greg Sarris