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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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Heather Swan is a poet, writer, and beekeeper. She is the author of Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field. In this essay, Heather travels to Columbia, where nearly fifty percent of the country’s 4,300 native species of orchid are endangered. As the Colombian people and landscape continue to recover from a half century of civil war, she meets one family who is pursuing restoration and resiliency by cultivating native orchids and returning them to the wild.

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In this interview, which weaves conversation, song, and the music of nightingales, folk singer Sam Lee speaks about the transformative experience of collaborating with nightingales, the stories of ancestors passed through folk music, and the space for communion that is opened with silence.

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Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee is a writer and Sufi teacher whose work focuses on spiritual responsibility in our present time of transition. His many books include A Handbook for Survivalists: Caring for the Earth, A Series of Meditations. In this essay, as Llewellyn witnesses the growing wasteland that we are creating, he seeks the threshold that could bring us back to the place where the land sings—a deep ecology of consciousness that returns our awareness to a fully animate world. Photo by Bear Guerra.

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David Farrier is the author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, a meditation on the Anthropocene and a search for the fossils that humans are leaving behind. In this essay, David reflects on the material weight of human-made objects and on the home as a structure that holds and records the trace of our presence on the Earth.

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Hala Alyan is a clinical psychologist, poet, and author. In this essay she reluctantly steps into the realm of fear in order to reckon with a precarious world. In the context of the pandemic and personal loss and trauma, she explores the psychology of being afraid, the presence of demons, and practices of courage and surrender. 

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