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 curious last inhabitants and their wise old dog. As a typhoon rises from the sea, reality, memory, and illusion begin to collapse into one another—and the pair find themselves increasingly inseparable from the mysterious landscape.

Read this essay on our website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Drew Lanham, an ornithologist and poet whose work engages confluences of race, place, and nature, Natalie follows a migration path from Chicago to South Carolina that brings the practice of birdwatching together with her own layered history. In landscapes both new and familiar, she shows us what’s possible when we bear witness with eyes wide open.

Read this essay.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 and subdue, say more about the culture they come from than about the land they describe? What would happen, Stephanie asks, if we moved beyond fantasies and savior complexes, and instead approached Antarctica as a living place with agency?

Read this story.

Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume.

Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

 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 Great Rift Valley: a place where some of our earliest ancestors emerged millions of years ago before dispersing in waves first across, and then out of the continent. As he discovers how deeply human movement, landscape, and survival are entwined, he wonders what such a place might remind us about who we truly are, and have always been.

Read this story.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 at Emergence’s recent Shifting Landscapes retreat held at Sharpham Trust in Devon, England, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee offers a frame for how we might navigate our current moment of unprecedented transition and transformation. Speaking to what can take root when we truly open ourselves to grief, love, and ultimately kinship with the living world, he urges us to step into the liminal—the space between worlds—to recognize an invitation into new ways of being.

Read the transcript.

Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, conquest, and degradation that have played out there, Chelsea locates the points at which human and wilderness were separated. Wondering what words, what prophetic voices are needed to guide us out of an entrenched dualism, she calls us to remember that we have always been intimately linked with the cycles of our ecosystems.

Read this essay on our website.

Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume.

Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 democratic imagination to include and represent animal voices in the decisions that affect them. Advocating for a quieting of our own narratives so that we might recognize political signals from the behaviors of the vast community around us, she envisions the revolutionary mechanisms which could make present the expressions of animals within our systems of power.

Read this story on our website.

Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 mark its physical and cultural terrains. Surfacing ancient geological movements alongside the deliberate construction of race in colonial America, she considers the entwinement of tectonic and human histories—the ancestral structures that remain in plain sight and out of view.

Read this essay on our website.

Explore more stories from Shifting Landscapes, our fourth print volume.

Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Lydia Millet imagines the plight of the last remaining Tasmanian tiger—a creature caught in the crosshairs of Australia’s settler narrative, eventually hunted to the point of extinction. As a man seeks the company of the tiger, housed in a failing zoo, he summons the courage to care for what remains amid an overwhelming sorrow for what has been lost.

Read this story on our website.

Find "Thylacine" and other "Short Stories of Apocalypse," in our inaugural print fiction collection.

Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 of language—in the trills, hoops, barks, bugles, clicks, and pulses of the life around him, David shares the connection to both deep time and the more-than-human world that can be found when we tune in to the Earth’s orchestra. Made entirely of the tiny trembling waves in air, the fugitive, ephemeral energy that we call sound, this experience combines human speech with other voices to immerse our senses and imaginations in the generative, provoking, and unifying power of sound.

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” on our website.

Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices