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...

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 look like if we activated change from a place of care, rather...

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 candor and humor that tempers his books, to create story,...

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 the mystery and wonder of fungi as a means of deconstructing our...

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, centuries, millennia” of temporal investment—in attuning oneself to...

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 changing Earth. Centering narratives of kinship amid the uncertainty...

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 might further bring love, courage, and connection into service...

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 in November 2023, this talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks to...

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 attuned to what he terms "sacramental time," the boundaries...

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 multimedia experience. Sign up for our newsletter to hear...

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 from the album Be Earth Now, produced by Fletcher Tucker at...

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 man and an injured elephant, her poem offers us the...

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 Salmon, follows our trajectory into extinction and invites the...

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 like, they wonder how an embrace of the unknowable and the unpredictable in our technology might in fact allow us to widen our thinking beyond the humancentric and step deeper into the mystery...

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 corn and what has been severed in this once deeply sacred relationship. With an eye to the unsustainable industrial practices—GMOs, monoculture, use of toxic fertilizers—that continue to dominate the landscape of agriculture,...

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 of home and safety; what it means to feel, to act, to care through the ancient, feral knowledge of instinct. Listening for teachings from the Earth, Kerri feels her way through the anguish and tenderness of raising a child in a...

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 legacy of assimilation into white colonialist culture. As she works to uncover the inherited wounds of her ancestors housed in her own bodily cells, she also reaches for a deeper remembering—writing her way into the landscapes and the cultural memories...

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 on boats as they wait endlessly to cross a heavily guarded border in pursuit of safety. One woman, tasked with holding prayers for their salvation, negotiates the entanglement of faith and politics as she considers who, or what, truly has the...

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 to the treasure-hiding game sekretiki she played as a child, from the histories held in whale earwax to the map of our human becoming in the Bouri Peninsula of modern-day Ethiopia. Reading each of these imprints as a kind of porthole—a window into memory, with all...