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.
Episodes
April 23, 2024 • 42 mins
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 thr...
Mark as Played
April 16, 2024 • 14 mins
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 Sanct...
Mark as Played
April 9, 2024 • 47 mins
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 microbi...
Mark as Played
April 2, 2024 • 66 mins
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 g...
Mark as Played
March 26, 2024 • 27 mins
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 cultiva...
Mark as Played
March 19, 2024 • 36 mins
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 Pune, India. Opening our senses to the terroir of her local milk—a union between cow, community, and land—she wonders how it can help us understand the diverse and robust ecology of this edge-place.
...
Mark as Played
March 12, 2024 • 56 mins
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 the Earth is asking us to return Her ever-present gaze with our tenderness and care, Emmanuel urges us to expand our love to embrace Her in every moment, in every landscape.
...
Mark as Played
March 5, 2024 • 37 mins
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 us into a community beyond the human. What can it mean to participate in such a cycle? Why together? Why now?
Read the transcript.
Sign up for our newsletter to hear more st...
Mark as Played
February 27, 2024 • 43 mins
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 that invite others into a space of reverence? In this week’s podcast, we’re featuring a conversation from 2021 with Irish writer, naturalist, and activist Dara McAnulty. As he wonders what the future might lo...
Mark as Played
February 20, 2024 • 39 mins
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 and the ways it can radically reshape our relationship to the cosmic order. Wondering how we can operate within our obligations to future generations, Tyson urges us, with the same...
Mark as Played
February 13, 2024 • 66 mins
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 Breathing with the Forest—explores the mycelial webs that infiltrate and sustain our landscapes. Embracing th...
Mark as Played
February 6, 2024 • 34 mins
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 with that of Thwaites, Elizabeth listens for the voice of the glacier, anticipating a quick, ready kinship. But as she recognizes the importance of time—“ribbons, reams, centurie...
Mark as Played
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 author Sam Lee to consider how we might rekindle awe and reciprocity by remembering ourselves as extensions of the changi...
Mark as Played
January 23, 2024 • 34 mins
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 reflects on the threads woven throughout her life. Advocating for a return to an “ecological self” that recognizes our interdependence with the living world, Joanna considers how we migh...
Mark as Played
January 16, 2024 • 44 mins
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 in the unprecedented transformation of our outer landscapes, our inner landscapes are also shifting in ways that demand our attention.
Given at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London ...
Mark as Played
January 9, 2024 • 50 mins
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 to us from the Liaoning province in northeastern China, Paul shares how moving at three miles per hour has deepened his personal relationship to time. As he becomes at...
Mark as Played
January 2, 2024 • 15 mins
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 falling in love with a bear, Martin invites us into a deep encounter with a living myth that gossips across species, drawing us back into call-and-response with the more-than-human world.
Explore the...
Mark as Played
December 19, 2023 • 22 mins
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 collection of poetry, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, which explores the nature of God through divinely received prayers. In this reading, excerpted fr...
Mark as Played
December 12, 2023 • 5 mins
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 a harmed Earth foster spaces of healing? In this week’s podcast, poet and author Camille T. Dungy reaches for the possibility of sanctuary amid pain and loss. Bearing witness to an encounter between a ...
Mark as Played
December 5, 2023 • 56 mins
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 the last human beings in the twilight of their civilization. Reflecting on humanity’s genius for extraction and domination, this uncanny tale, narrated by acclaimed British actor Colin ...
Mark as Played
Popular Podcasts
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Anna Sale explores the big questions and hard choices that are often left out of polite conversation.
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people.
A straightforward look at the day's top news in 20 minutes. Powered by ABC News. Hosted by Brad Mielke.