Emergence Magazine Podcast

When we increasingly turn to AI to produce written work with just the click of a button, we risk not only eroding our capacity to imagine and give form to ideas, but we also strip writing of the mysterious process that makes it alive and meaningful. This week, Stephanie Krzywonos explores how the age-old labor of writing has always been a profoundly embodied act, and considers how all our creations, whether impressed in clay or typed on a computer, are microcosms of Earth’s own generativity. As AI increasingly does work for us, she wonders if we are closing ourselves off from the intelligence of the Earth.
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Illustration by Aldo Jarillo.

In 2022, during a field trip to Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador, mycologist Giuliana Furci, author Robert Macfarlane, legal scholar and More-Than-Human (MOTH) Life Collective founder César Rodríguez-Garavito, and musician Cosmo Sheldrake wrote and recorded “Song of the Cedars”: a composition made not just in the forest, but in conscious collaboration with it. This week, we return to a conversation between them that explores their time in the forest and their ongoing efforts to secure legal recognition for its role in creating the song. Interspersed with the track’s polyphony—toucan calls, cicada strings, and leaf chatter woven with human voices—this conversation invites you to listen to what true creative reciprocity with the Earth can sound like.
Read the transcript.
Photo by Robert Macfarlane.

In 2022, during a field trip to Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador, mycologist Giuliana Furci, author Robert Macfarlane, legal scholar and More-Than-Human (MOTH) Life Collective founder César Rodríguez-Garavito, and musician Cosmo Sheldrake wrote and recorded “Song of the Cedars”: a composition made not just in the forest, but in conscious collaboration with it. This week, we return to a conversation between them that explores their time in the forest and their ongoing efforts to secure legal recognition for its role in creating the song. Interspersed with the track’s polyphony—toucan calls, cicada strings, and leaf chatter woven with human voices—this conversation invites you to listen to what true creative reciprocity with the Earth can sound like.
Read the transcript.
Photo by Robert Macfarlane.

If the very act of seeing distances us from the living world, how can ancient modes of seeing and being help us navigate our era of disconnection? This week we return to our conversation with poet, translator, and author David Hinton as part of our exploration of the seasons. Drawing on Taoist and Ch’an Buddhist philosophies, David reveals how offering attention to the beauty of simple moments, like birdsong and blossom-fall, can bring us into a particular quality of awareness; and how the cycles of absence and presence in the seasons are mirrored by the cycles of form and emptiness in our own inner worlds.
Read the transcript.
Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.
Photo by Phil Dera

How can we put our emerging knowledge around forest systems into practice? In this episode, renowned forest ecologist Suzanne Simard returns to the podcast to talk about her latest book, When the Forest Breathes, and her decades-long Mother Tree Project, which integrates Western science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge to reshape our forest harvesting methods in ways that protect the integrity of both their ecosystems and our climate futures. As she shares her team’s landmark findings on what Mother Trees are telling us about generational resilience, Suzanne challenges us to begin working with the intelligence of the forest.
Read the transcript.
Photo by Bill Heath