Podcast
Our podcast features exclusive interviews, author-narrated essays, fiction, multipart series, and more. We feature new podcast episodes weekly on Tuesdays.
This Week’s Podcast
This Week’s Podcast
Sanctuaries of Silence: A Listening Journey
by Adam Loften & Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
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 2018. Guided by Gordon, we embark into the Hoh Rain Forest, one of the quietest places in North America. As he attunes our ears to its silence, we begin to hear the music of life emerge in every direction—the murmur of the river, the shuffle of trees, the cacophony of birdsong. We recommend putting on headphones for this one, so you can have the best listening experience.
Most Recent Podcasts
Fermentation as Metaphor
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, yogurts—can bring us into relationship with the tiny but vital unseen forces of the living world.
Earth as Koan, Earth as Self
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 speaks to how we must respond to our moment of suffering from a place of openness if we are to remember our seamlessness with all of creation.
Reading the Rocks
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 place, as we would a person, what is your story?
Holy Terroir: Finding Taste in an Edge-Place
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.
Enraptured with Earth
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.
Chasing Cicadas
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?
Finding Joy in the Unknown
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 than fear, Dara uplifts joy as an essential tool in transforming our current moment.
Deep Time Diligence
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, data, and technology from a place of “right relationship.”
Mycelial Landscapes
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 Western philosophies around the self, the nature of intelligence, and the possibilities within community, each spoke to how the relational phenomenon of fungi could soften the imagined boundaries between our bodies and the great biosphere.
Glacial Longings
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 the Earth’s responses, she surrenders to the slow unfolding conversation between humans and the more-than-human world.
Seeds of Reciprocity
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 of our time—and inviting the surprise of spontaneous, emergent song—each share ways in which their work opens spaces of connection with the living world.
Widening Circles
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 during this time of climate catastrophe, remembering that we are, and always have been, home on this Earth.
An Offering of Remembrance
Given at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London in November 2023, this talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks to the possibility of profound inner transformation amid the great changes engulfing the Earth. Exploring the need to step away from a humancentric paradigm and towards a remembrance of the Earth as a divine being, Emmanuel asks: As so much falls away, what can we offer to the Earth? How can we place Earth back at the center of the story? What opens when love once again becomes present between us?
Featured Episodes
The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance
As we look to an uncertain future, what systems of exchange might we embrace that support and deepen our interdependence? In this essay, Potawatomi scientist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, considering the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy.
When the Earth Started to Sing
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.
Ten Love Letters to the Earth
In honor of the passing of Buddhist monk and Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, we republished his Ten Love Letters to the Earth, a series of meditations that engage us in intimate conversation with the living world. Here, Emergence Executive Editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee reads all ten letters for our podcast. Composed as a living dialogue, they are even more potent when recited. We invite you to read them aloud yourself, joining your voice to Thich Naht Hanh’s call to fall in love with the Earth.
Sanctuaries of Silence: A Listening Journey
In this immersive listening journey from our archive, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton guides us into the Hoh Rain Forest—one of the quietest places in North America. In a world drowned out by the din of modern life, Hempton offers a way to attune our ears to the sounds that emerge in the absence of noise and reconnect with the silence of the living world.
A Path Older Than Memory
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 between the physical and metaphysical begin to blur into an expansive experience of timelessness.
Finding the Mother Tree
Suzanne Simard is known for her groundbreaking research on the belowground fungal networks that connect trees and facilitate inter-tree communication and interaction. We continue to explore Futures this week with another story on motherhood—this time within the world of trees. In this interview, Suzanne discusses her book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest and shares her latest research on how Mother Trees recognize and support their kin.
A Primordial Covenant of Relationship
In this talk given at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London, Sufi teacher and Emergence Executive Editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks about what it looks like to live in an unfolding apocalyptic reality and the creative possibilities that are waiting to be embodied. In this time of deep uncertainty, he reminds us of the ancient, primordial covenant of relationship with the living world that can give us a ground to stand on, and the sacred nature of creation that is always there, waiting for us to return to it.
Valemon The Bear: Myth in the Age of the Anthropocene
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.
Beings Seen and Unseen
How can stories return us to what is essential as we navigate an uncertain future? In this conversation with Amitav Ghosh, author of The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, he calls on storytellers to lead us in the necessary work of collective reimagining—decentering human narratives and re-centering stories of the land.
The Nightingale’s Song
To mark the beginning of England’s nightingale season, we revisit our conversation with acclaimed folk singer, conservationist, and song collector Sam Lee, who steps into the forest each spring to sing with these beloved birds. In this interview, Sam reflects on the ancient musical kinship between humans and nightingales—melodies shared and silences exchanged—and the parallels between folk music and birdsong that embody deep connection to place. Finding a re-enchantment with the Earth through his practice, Sam speaks of the great importance of listening, and, as Britain’s nightingale population declines, a hope that music might offer the bird a path back into cultural consciousness.
Playlists & Series
