Emergence Magazine Podcast

In a season of loss, how does absence offer a greater understanding of presence? This week, Terry Tempest Williams brings us into her love affair with Utah’s Great Salt Lake, a place that nourishes twelve million migrating birds, bison herds, and deep-rooted human communities, and which is now in retreat. Contemplating how we might be in service to this dying lake, Terry summons us to be present with the losses in the landscape.
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Photo by Christina Seely

Depicting a distant age in which river guardians, mothmen, and condor trackers strive to protect a dying world, novelist Lydia Millet asks whether we can navigate species loss not through visions of saviors, but through patient devotion to what might yet emerge through care. Amid extreme temperatures and invasive insects, this short story follows a team of caretakers who track, feed, and hatch the clutches of “the old ones”—ancient desert tortoises nearing extinction.
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Credit: Daniel Farò / Connected Archives

For plants, the moment of spring emergence is the gamble of their lives, says journalist Zoë Schlanger. They rely on a convergence of genetic instructions from within and environmental cues from without to know when it is time to bring new life into the world. But what happens when seasonal markers and a plant’s molecular memory, shaped by generations of winters, no longer agree? Seeing this increasing tension between timelines reflected in her own journey toward parenthood, Zoë asks how we can steward a world where the fragile conversations between biological clocks are being rewritten.
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Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.
Photo by Sam Laughlin.

In this week’s story, biologist Brian Isett ponders the age-old question his young daughter will inevitably ask — Where did the Moon come from? — and uncovers how the Earth got Her seasonal song. He introduces us to Theia, the proto-planet that came crashing into the surface of our infant planet four and a half billion years ago, tilting the Earth on Her axis and birthing the Moon. This meeting ultimately shaped the passing of time, the movement of tides, and the cycle of the seasons as we have known them. With the seasons now changing in response to our neglect of the Earth, Theia offers a reminder that these rhythms have always evolved through relationship. 

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Image: Earth’s reflection on the Moon / NASA.

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Sharing a depth of attention for what stands to be lost in our relationship with the seasons, Volume 6 contributors Terry Tempest Williams and Susan Murphy Roshi come together to explore the theme of requiem in this first conversation of a companion series to Seasons. Drawing on their respective essays, “A Hollow Bone” and “Alive In the Skin of a River’s Flow,” Terry and Susan contemplate what becomes present amid absence, a love for the burning world, and ways we can move with flock consciousness through this time of ecological uncertainty.

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Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

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