As part of a new Emergence series, we’re publishing a selection of essays from Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations—a five-volume collection edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer—including this poignant essay from Richard Powers. Richard is the author of twelve novels, including the newly released Bewilderment, and The Overstory, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. In this essay, as he reflects on whether there is a genetic basis for altruism, Richard arrives at story as the vehicle through which human beings can find kinship with other creatures—recognizing and remembering our shared narrative in the urgent drama of this moment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emergence Magazine Podcast

A Little More Than Kin – Richard Powers

Catherine Bush is the author of five novels, including Blaze Island, Accusation, and Claire’s Head. She is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Guelph and divides her time between Toronto and the countryside of eastern Ontario. In this essay, Catherine tends to the understory in a time of mounting ecological loss. As invasive plants proliferate in a park near her childhood home in Toronto, she considers her family’s own history as transplanted immigrants and how acts of reciprocity and care for the land might unknit despair.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Invasives: Unknitting Despair in a Tangled Landscape – Catherine Bush

We’re featuring this episode from our Language Keepers podcast series in honor of Marie Wilcox, the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language and the creator of the first and only Wukchumni dictionary. On Saturday, September 25, 2021, Marie passed away at the age of 88. Marie was a remarkable woman who was deeply committed to her family, the Wukchumni language, and to the Native language revitalization movement. She worked tirelessly for years to ensure the survival of her language, an effort that will serve her family and community for generations to come.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Language Keepers, Episode 4: Wukchumni

Jack Dash and Luke Swenson are the creators of Atascosa Borderlands, a visual storytelling project combining botanical survey, oral history, and documentary photography to explore the Atascosa Highlands: an ecological crossroads that straddles the US and Mexico border in the Sonoran Desert. This piece documents Jack and Luke’s recent visit to the Highlands, where ancient populations of silverleaf oak, saguaro, and sweet acacia grow with no sense that the land around them is divided. But as the border wall imposes a hard boundary, this island of biodiversity faces an increasingly fragmented future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Atascosa Borderlands – Jack Dash and Luke Swenson

Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian, specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. In this essay, Bathsheba accompanies a Gwitchin friend on a moose hunt north of the Arctic Circle, and witnesses patterns of contrasting stories manifested in the landscape: one of conquest and inattention seen in collapsing river banks and melting permafrost; and another of restraint, held in the quiet knowing of the moose.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Living in the Bones – Bathsheba Demuth

This week we’re featuring a favorite interview from our archives: Emergence Executive Editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee’s conversation with the acclaimed British writer Robert Macfarlane. The two originally spoke in 2019, as part of our language-themed issue, in a conversation that explored the lyrical relationship between language and landscapes, and the consequence, responsibility, and the pleasure of naming the living world.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaking the Anthropocene – a conversation with Robert Macfarlane

Charles Foster is a writer, barrister, and traveler. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide and The Screaming Sky. In this essay, Charles considers his role as a writer seeking to experience and express communion with the more-than-human world, and begins to wonder if language can do anything other than constrain and tame the tangled wild. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Against Nature Writing – Charles Foster

Natalie Rose Richardson is a poet and writer who was born in New York City to a long line of border-crossers and proud people of blended heritage. In this essay, Natalie searches for her great-grandfather’s grave in a historically segregated cemetery and confronts the American notion of paradise as an ideology which imposes walls of separation onto the multilayered landscape—allowing some in and keeping others out.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paradise Extended – Natalie Rose Richardson

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

Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves – J. Drew Lanham

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

Meltwater: A Timepiece for the Arctic – Stephen Lezak

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

A Forest Walk – a guided practice by Kimberly Ruffin

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

The Life Story of a Recipe – Gina Rae La Cerva

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

Return of the Foreigners – Nick Hunt

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

The Forest of Orchids – Heather Swan

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

The Nightingale's Song – a conversation with Sam Lee

Emergence Magazine is a quarterly online publication exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Each issue explores a theme through innovative digital media, as well as the written and spoken word. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories and more. www.emergencemagazine.org

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Emergence Magazine Podcast

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