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In celebration of Earth Day, we are resharing the podcast adaptation of our award-winning virtual reality experience, Sanctuaries of Silence, an immersive listening journey into the Hoh Rainforest, one of the quietest places left in North America. In this experience we join acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton as he guides us in reconnecting with the silence filling this ancient forest and shares what is lost when that silence is filled with noise.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this essay, conservation scientist Lauren Oakes listens to three generations of an Iñupiat family in Kotzebue, Alaska, discuss the transformations and losses in their community—located thirty miles north of the Arctic Circle—that have resulted from climate change and COVID-19. As she reflects on what will be needed to build resilience in the face of an uncertain future, Lauren considers the meeting place of scientific knowledge and Indigenous ways of knowing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Rainer Maria Rilke’s seminal collection of poetry, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, the great twentieth-century poet explores the nature of—and his relationship to—God through divinely "received" prayers.Nearly twenty-five years ago, Anita Barrows, an award-winning poet and translator, and Joanna Macy, a Buddhist scholar and eco-philosopher, collaborated to translate this collection. Now, on the new album Be Earth Now, produced by Fletcher Tucker at Gnome Life Records, Anita and Joanna recite a selection of these poems. Through their potent recitations, they bring the spirit of Rilke’s words fully into our time and remind us of the ever-urgent call to love the world into being.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Arati Kumar-Rao ventures into a forested river gorge in the hidden land of Pemakö, which exists deep within the heart of the Tibetan Buddhist belief system. Intersected by the sacred waters of the Yarlung Tsangpo river, and its tributary the Yang Sang Chu, Pemakö has long been considered impenetrable and prophesied as a place that will one day regenerate and renew the world. But, as Arati learns, this prophecy is now confronted by the persistent grind of industry that threatens to invade this promised land. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andri Snær Magnason is an Icelandic writer and documentary filmmaker. In this interview, Andri discusses his book On Time and Water and our relationship to time in an age of ecological crisis. With Iceland having lost its first large glacier, the Ok glacier, this past summer—Andri discusses the ways in which geological time is beginning to move at the speed of human time. In order to bring about a planetary paradigm shift, he says, we need new ways to see and imagine ourselves into the future. This interview was originally released on the Emergence Podcast on December 9th, 2019.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this essay, Boricua author Jamie Figueroa brings her pen to the blank pages of her family’s history, exploring writing as a tool of revelation and healing in confronting a legacy of generational trauma and assimilation into a white colonialist culture. “You’re left with an accumulation of blanks, superficial displays you know better than to trust. I am magnetized to what is behind and beneath. I excavate with my pen.”As she works to uncover the inherited wounds of her ancestors housed in her own bodily cells, she also reaches for a deeper remembering—writing her way into the landscapes and the cultural memories that bring together the pieces of her identity.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anna Badkhen is a writer and essayist who has written about a dozen wars on three continents and has spent most of her life in the Global South. Her books include Fisherman’s Blues: A West African Community at Sea and Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah. In this narrated essay, Anna embarks on a weeklong journey across the Sahara desert, tracing the ancient route that pilgrims once caravanned from the Atlantic coast to Mecca. Along the way, she contemplates human movement across shifting landscapes, the impermanence of memory, and what remains eternal in the face of erasure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In pursuit of a contemplative inner life amid a world in upheaval, Fred Bahnson looks to the early desert monks for guidance on how to direct our gaze and maintain an attentive heart. As he ponders the role of prayer, he considers the individual and collective healing it can offer. “Those seconds of stillness, those brief moments when we glimpse purity of heart, can add up to hours, days, months, even years of our life,” he writes. “Until one day they become our life.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whenever an earthquake strikes Japan, the myth of the giant catfish Ōnamazu reminds people that the living world is full of complex meaning. In the face of repeated natural disasters, Marie Mutsuki Mockett looks to her mother’s homeland to recall stories that could change our relationship with what we call “nature.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rachel Carson had met? Imagining an exchange in the year 1964, as the civil rights and environmental movements were forging parallel and increasingly urgent paths into American culture, J. Drew Lanham explores the power and necessity of convergence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the world falters, threatening native ecosystems and Indigenous lifeways, acclaimed Australian Aboriginal author Alexis Wright turns inward to the dwelling place of ancestral story. From here, she considers how her ancient culture has responded to ongoing destruction—and how to bear witness to the creation of a post-apocalyptic world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Born in Battambang, Cambodia, during the Khmer Rouge regime, Kalyanee Mam immigrated to the United States in 1981 with her family. In this narrated essay, Kalyanee traces her father’s struggle for agency and acceptance in America against the backdrop of the false promise of the American Dream. As she reflects on her father’s death—“from pain and heartache for a homeland he could never return to and the disappointment of a dreamland where he would never be accepted”—she considers her Cambodian heritage, her upbringing in the United States, and the deep belonging that can be found when one is anchored in ancestry and homeland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Even as the pandemic has isolated us from one another, it has also revealed new paths into deeper communion with and connection to the living world. From her home in the UK during lockdown, Lucy Jones endeavors to understand her lifelong, otherworldly experiences in nature. Unable to find answers in the evangelical Christianity of her upbringing or in the scientific papers and studies that have made up the bulk of her recent research, Lucy arrives at Druidry. As she steps further into this mysterious and ancient tradition, she encounters ways of thinking and being that speak clearly to the essential problems of our time and offer an alternative to a culture of ecological destruction.

In this narrated essay, Tristan McConnell ventures into the shrinking mountain forests that surround Mount Kenya, home to medicinal plants, ancient trees, rivers, and rainfall. In the wake of the legacies of colonialism and rampant poverty that have stripped much of the country of its trees, he encounters Kenyan foragers, conservationists, and elders who are working to restore the forests and safeguard its value.

Just as modern science is catching up to the ancient understanding of our deep emotional and physiological relationship to the living world, the twin forces of urbanization and technological advancement are pulling our bodies and our attention away from the elements and rhythms of nature that are so essential to our well-being.In this narrated essay, naturalist Michael McCarthy explores the ways in which the “anthropause” ushered in by the coronavirus has—on an unprecedented scale—made nature visible again, even as the world’s growing cities increasingly sever humanity from the living world. “Perhaps the most significant way of all in which nature has come back to us during the pandemic,” he says, “is that people turned to it themselves.”

As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. While the free market system we embrace in the United States touts individualism and defines value by monetary worth, a gift economy functions through an ethic of reciprocity and interconnection. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies of exchange? “Thriving is possible,” she writes, “only if you have nurtured strong relations with your community.”

In this in-depth interview, Reverend angel Kyodo williams reflects on our widespread crisis of story, the failure of institutional religions to offer a new way forward, and her philosophy of Radical Dharma—a path to individual and collective liberation. This interview was originally published in 2019 as part of our Faith Issue.

As a chemical plant in St. James Parish, Louisiana, threatens a majority Black community with toxic emissions, Boyce Upholt looks deeply at the nature of air and considers how it can challenge the often white ideal of the wild as a place of escape.

In this narrated essay, poet Jake Skeets enters into the memories he shares through touch and, in doing so, conjures a deep reverence for the spaces we remember. From a stubbled chin and stucco wall to bloody knees and tadpoles, the memories he shares are held in the physicality of the body. It is through what he calls “radical remembering,” which carries us across the time and space of existence, that he unfolds these “memory fields” through language and storytelling and offers this Diné perspective of time, memory, and land.

Rowen White is a Seedkeeper from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and an activist for Indigenous seed sovereignty. In this in-depth interview originally published in our Food Issue, Rowen shares what seeds—her greatest teachers—have shown her: that resilience is rooted in diversity and that seeds carry the potential for the restoration of the living systems that nourish us. Seeds, she says, reflect back to us encoded memories of how to nurture a food system that is rooted in a culture of belonging. As we gather safely around the table this coming week, we invite you to consider our relationship to the foods that nourish us and to reflect on the encoded memories of planting and care that you carry.