Episodes

  • Sun House – A Conversation with David James Duncan

    Sun House – A Conversation with David James Duncan
    Jun 3 2025
    What does it mean to search for transcendence in a world going completely out of balance? From our archive, this interview with acclaimed author David James Duncan explores his epic novel Sun House, which follows an eclectic collection of characters as they each seek Truth and meaning, together forming an unintentional community in rural Montana. Talking about the ways a heart can be transformed by deep experiences of mystical transcendence, David shares the impetus behind the novel: to impart an experiential model of contemplative inner life that could help us navigate our ecological unraveling. He also speaks about the mystics, from Zen master Dōgen to the thirteenth-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, and what futures might become possible if we open our consciousness to love and the Divine. Read the transcript. Photo by Chris La Tray. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • The Ethics of Listening to Whales – A Conversation with James Bridle, Rebecca Giggs, César Rodríguez-Garavito, and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

    The Ethics of Listening to Whales – A Conversation with James Bridle, Rebecca Giggs, César Rodríguez-Garavito, and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
    May 27 2025
    What if we listened to the complex clicks of whales and could understand their meanings? What would we hear and how might we respond? More-Than-Human (MOTH) Life Collective founder César Rodríguez-Garavito, artist and technologist James Bridle, and author Rebecca Giggs come together in this conversation with Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee to explore the ethical, legal, and relational implications of a new project using AI machine learning to translate the speech of sperm whales. Contemplating the human-centric linking of language with intelligence, the moral complexities of collecting and using these translations, and what it might mean to have an ear for “whale-ish,” they discuss whether a shared language is even needed to find a depth of kinship with whales. Read the transcript. Image: Mike Korostelev / Moment via Getty Images Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • Is a River Alive? – A Conversation with Robert Macfarlane

    Is a River Alive? – A Conversation with Robert Macfarlane
    May 20 2025
    In this conversation, acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane asks the ancient and urgent question: is a river alive? Understanding rivers to be presences, not resources, he immerses us in the ways they “irrigate our bodies, thoughts, songs, and stories,” and how we might recognize this within our imagination and ethics. He speaks about his latest book, and traces his journeys down the Río Los Cedros in Ecuador, the waterways of Chennai in India, and the Mutehekau Shipu in Nitassinan and how each brought him to experience these water bodies as willful, spirited, and sacred beings. Read the transcript. Photo by William Waterworth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • A Small King – Nicholas Triolo

    A Small King – Nicholas Triolo
    May 13 2025
    Writer Nicholas Triolo walks the length of the Rio Côa in central Portugal with a book by Christian mystic Thomas Merton in his pack. For Merton, the living world shimmered with a divine feminine presence, meaning all within it was worthy of our love. Along the winding landscape of the Côa, damaged by agriculture and home to endangered animals, Nicholas witnesses the messy, subversive nature of “rewilding.” And with Merton as his companion on the journey, he begins to feel a wild, relational divinity in the land around him, and a devotion essential to rewilding place and self amid today’s crises of despair and destruction. Read the essay. Photo by Ricardo Ferreira / Courtesy of Rewilding Portugal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    45 mins
  • In the Wake of the Sandbound – Nick Hunt

    In the Wake of the Sandbound – Nick Hunt
    May 6 2025
    Nick Hunt traverses the spine of the Curonian Spit in the Baltic Sea, and learns how its sands—anchored by forest roots for millennia—began to move rapidly and swallow villages in the eighteenth century when woodlands and sacred groves were systematically clear-cut for timber. Though halted through engineering and reforestation, the dunes are now eroding under human footsteps, and spilling into the lagoon they border. As he witnesses how quickly landscapes are changed by our own hands, Nick asks if the challenge is not in reversing the damage we’ve done, but in remembering humility before the forces of the Earth. Read the essay. Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    37 mins
  • The Aquarium – Daisy Hildyard read by Colin Salmon

    The Aquarium – Daisy Hildyard read by Colin Salmon
    Apr 29 2025
    English novelist Daisy Hildyard envisions the deep time evolution of the coastline of Scarborough, North Yorkshire: from a prehistoric meteor strike, to a 19th-century seaside aquarium devoid of fish, a present-day spate of dead tides, and a future where part of the human population has evolved into a hybrid marine species, drawn back to the cradle of the sea to care for its degraded waters. Vividly narrated by acclaimed British actor Colin Salmon, and created as part of Wild Eye—an art and nature trail in Yorkshire that raises awareness about coastal erosion in the face of climate change—this short story traces the forever-shifting tides of our relationship with the sea. Read the story. Illustration by Muhammad Fatchurofi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    29 mins
  • A Special Celebration of the Earth’s Sounds and Songs

    A Special Celebration of the Earth’s Sounds and Songs
    Apr 22 2025
    In celebration of Earth Day, this episode invites you to offer your ears to the polyphony of sounds and silences that give the planet Her voice with two of our most cherished audio stories. “When the Earth Started to Sing,” by biologist David G. Haskell, combines human speech with more-than-human voices to immerse your senses in the connective power of sound across deep time. “Sanctuaries of Silence,” an adaptation of our virtual reality experience featuring acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, brings you to the Hoh Rain Forest—one of the quietest places in North America—and guides you through the sounds that emerge in the absence of noise. Illustration by Daniel Liévano. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • The Fault of Time – Erica Berry

    The Fault of Time – Erica Berry
    Apr 15 2025
    As humans, we long for stability, yet the Earth tells us in many languages—erosion, ice melt, the seasons—that all is fleeting in an endless cycle of creation and destruction. Grappling with her fear of change caused by wildfires in Montana and the long-overdue Cascadia earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, Erica Berry confronts how the colonial erasure of Indigenous stories of place and her own limited sense of time have blinded her to the Earth’s dramatic flux. As she learns that impermanence doesn’t always signal loss, but rather the transformation of form, she finds a way to hold the fluctuation of the lands she loves. Read the essay. Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. Photo by Zeb Andrews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    25 mins
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