Alongside our online release of stories from Volume 5: Time, a series of talks given by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee at an April retreat in Devon, England, brings together many of the themes explored in the print edition. This first talk offers a way to re-attune our sense of time to be in relationship with the cycles of the Earth—from the deep time movement of mountains, to the fleeting bloom and decay of cherry blossom. While we have stripped time down to...

Released this week, the final film in our Shifting Landscapes documentary film series, Taste of the Land, tells the story of Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam’s search for a spiritual relationship with her homeland. In this companion essay by Kalyanee, she delves deeper into her experiences of cheate—the Khmer word for “taste”—and how she came to understand that to truly know the essence of the land, one must know its taste. Tracing her life back to its very beginnings, she shares her...

In his book The Nutmeg’s Curse, scholar Amitav Ghosh writes, “the planet will never come alive for you unless your songs and stories give life to all the beings seen and unseen that inhabit a living Earth,”—seeding a shift in consciousness begins with the stories we tell. In this wide-ranging interview from our archives, Amitav explores the themes of his recent work, including the insidious philosophy that the Earth is inert and how this belief paved the way for the implementation of violent...

How can we learn to be with the grief that arises within as we witness the destruction being wrought upon the Earth? When we are broken open by the pain of loss, how can we hold and work with the seeds of despair, but also love, that flood into that space? This week, we revisit “Thylacine,” a short story by American novelist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet that imagines the twilight of the last remaining Tasmanian tiger, a creature caught in the crosshairs of Australia’s violent...

In December last year, Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam’s short film Lost World screened at our Shifting Landscapes exhibition in London. Kalyanee’s films tenderly document the changing cultural and ecological landscapes of her homeland, and in Lost World she shares the story of a community in Koh Sralau whose livelihoods are threatened as the mangrove forests they depend on are ruthlessly mined for sand to build an “eco-park” in Singapore. In this conversation, recorded live at the...

This talk was a keynote given by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee during a conference on spiritual ecology and peace building at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in July. It explores how spiritual ecology is fundamentally a memory of living in kinship with the Earth that must be reawakened if we are to embody a spiritual connection with the living world. Turning to praise and prayer, and the many forms they take, as ways to return to this...

This short story, written by Andri Snær Magnason for our third print edition, follows an architect in Reykjavík grappling with the growing discord between his creativity and a capitalist reality. Laying bare the ways narratives of control and human supremacy can manifest in the physical objects we make, “Giantstone” asks us to consider what new stories could begin to shape our inner and outer worlds. Will we remain stuck in our humancentric philosophies, or will our art come to reflect a way...

The warming of the planet is ushering in changes on a mythological scale. Oceans heat up, ice shelves melt, great floods swallow landscapes, ancient forests are reduced to ash. In this interview from our archive, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason speaks about how such incomprehensible changes are accelerating geological timescales. Instead of playing out over millennia, vast transformations of the Earth are now happening in the span of a lifetime, and in rapid succession. An accompaniment...

ChatGPT has divided opinion on how artificial intelligence might shape our future: Is it a harbinger of our demise? Or a friend, arrived just in time to guide us through our collective unraveling? As we entangle ourselves with this technology, are there ways we can use it to transform our intelligence, rather than simply replicating it? In this week’s essay, writer and adaptive leadership trainer Dana Karout pokes fun at the ways ChatGPT mirrors our own limited ways of thinking. Drawing on...

Last week we released Aloha ‘Āina, the second film in our Shifting Landscapes documentary film series, which tells the story of how acclaimed Native Hawaiian poet Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio brought her poetry and love of the land to the forefront of the movement to protect the sacred Mauna Kea from the construction of a thirty-meter telescope. To complement the film, we’re returning to an investigative story we published several years ago when moves to begin construction first ignited...

Although the ecological sphere has long declared the need for a shift in consciousness if we are to survive the myriad crises we’ve ignited, this conversation often lacks examples of what this change in consciousness might be like as a lived, embodied experience. This week, author of the cult classics The Brothers K and The River Why, David James Duncan, joins the podcast to speak about his new epic novel, Sun House—a story following the journeys of an eclectic collection of characters, each...

This month we released the first film in our new four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series exploring the role of art and the storyteller in our age of ecological crisis. The inspiration for The Nightingales Song, which spends time with British folk singer Sam Lee during nightingale season as he joins the bird in mutual song, grew from a special interview we held with Sam in 2021. To accompany the film, we’re returning to this conversation with Sam, where he shares the story of how...

In this conversation, held in May at the Architectural Association in London, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee and architect, artist, and journalist Marko Milovanovic talk about Time, our fifth annual print edition, and our exploration of the mystery that lies beyond our humancentric notions of Time. Ranging from the kinds of time that can bring us back into relationship with the living world, to the mystical Sufi poet Rumi, and the impulses shaping our print editions, this...

In this conversation from our Shifting Landscapes exhibition, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is joined by Marshmallow Laser Feast creative director Ersin Han Ersin, one of the artists behind the exhibition’s large-scale installation, Breathing with the Forest, which invites you into an experience of exchanging breath with a forest in the Colombian Amazon. Talking about the ways MLF’s projects bring together science and imagination to illuminate the hidden connections within...

When we step into a forest aware and listening to what surrounds us—remembering that the living world is just as aware of our presence—a relationship of reciprocity can take root. How might such a quality of attention change our ability to see, feel, and give ourselves to the landscapes around us? In this audio practice, writer and certified nature and forest therapy guide Kimberly Ruffin takes us on a sensory walk to meet the soil, sky, smells, and sounds of the forest. Encouraging us to “be...

How would our response to the ecological crisis be different if we understood that our own consciousness is as wild as the breathing Earth around us? In this conversation, poet, translator, and author David Hinton reaches back to a time when cultures were built around a reverence for the Earth and proposes that the sixth extinction we now face is rooted in philosophical assumptions about our separation from the living world. Urging us to reweave mind and landscape, he offers an ethics...

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 three billion years of our planet’s sound evolution in the...

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 Sanctuaries of Silence—one of the first stories we released back in...

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 microbial communities through food—breads, fungi, pickles,...

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 gateway to truly connecting with the world around us, and...

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 cultivating this sustained attention, Jenny shows how we can ask a...

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. Read the essay. Photo: Daniel J. Rao / Alamy Learn more about...

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. Read the transcript. Learn more about future events and...

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 stories as they are released each week. Design by Studio...