Episodes

  • Is Paddy Heneghan Dead? – Liam Heneghan

    Is Paddy Heneghan Dead? – Liam Heneghan
    Jun 24 2025
    In this third story we’re sharing in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature, ecosystem ecologist Liam Heneghan turns to a council of philosophers and physicists to help reconcile the human experience of growth with the reality of decay as he keeps vigil by his father’s bedside. He contemplates how closely life sits at the margins of death—one bleeding into the other—and wonders what can be learned from the everyday breakdown of leaves, milk, friendships, solar systems that might orient us to the nature of our own passage from life to death. As his father passes—elements dispersing into air and soil—Liam recognizes that all that flourishes must return to Earth; that in decay, something always endures. Read the essay. Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show More Show Less
    26 mins
  • Fire in the Belly — Tyson Yunkaporta

    Fire in the Belly — Tyson Yunkaporta
    Jun 17 2025
    The second in a series of stories we’re sharing in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature, this narrated essay by Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta explores the ways we’ve long mistaken cerebral thinking for knowing, and in doing so, dulled a more vital intelligence. He argues that we are “overthinking and underfeeling” our existence, and reminds us that we have a second brain: the gut, which “governs terrestrial relations and is in constant communication with land and all our human and nonhuman kin.” Likening our intellect to lightning, Tyson shares how we must let it interact with the regenerative and relational “fire” of our bellies if we are to respond properly to the needs of land and cosmos. Read the essay. Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show More Show Less
    31 mins
  • Supracellular: A Meditation – Sophie Strand

    Supracellular: A Meditation – Sophie Strand
    Jun 10 2025
    Over the next month we'll be sharing four stories in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature. In this first one, author Sophie Strand uses her imagination to feel herself as part of the more-than-human world—as river, hummingbird, and mycelial network. Opening herself up to a “supracellular” state, she practices letting her mind leak beyond the bounds of individual consciousness and through the threads of relation that she shares with her ecosystem to experience being not a siloed self, but a web of interconnectivity. What empathy might take root and grow, she asks, when we practice thinking like this—when we imagine our consciousness to extend far beyond the confines of our own bodies? Read the essay. Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show More Show Less
    20 mins
  • 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
    Show More Show Less
    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
    Show More Show Less
    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
    Show More Show Less
    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
    Show More Show Less
    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
    Show More Show Less
    37 mins