Emergence Magazine Podcast Emergence Magazine

This month we released the first film in our new four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series exploring the role of art and the storyteller in our age of ecological crisis. The inspiration for The Nightingales Song, which spends time with British folk singer Sam Lee during nightingale season as he joins the bird in mutual song, grew from a special interview we held with Sam in 2021.
To accompany the film, we’re returning to this conversation with Sam, where he shares the story of how the call of the nightingale opened him to a kinship with the more-than-human. Reflecting on how this bird has served as a “wisdom keeper” and “unlocker” of hearts for generations of poets, musicians, and storytellers, he also speaks more about his process of leading audiences into this magical space of communion with the nightingale each spring.
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Watch the film The Nightingale's Song, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the first in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series.
Photo by Dominick Tyler.
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In this conversation, held in May at the Architectural Association in London, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee and architect, artist, and journalist Marko Milovanovic talk about Time, our fifth annual print edition, and our exploration of the mystery that lies beyond our humancentric notions of Time. Ranging from the kinds of time that can bring us back into relationship with the living world, to the mystical Sufi poet Rumi, and the impulses shaping our print editions, this talk explores the vision behind Emergence to help reweave the worlds of ecology, culture, and spirituality, and once again understand the Earth is alive, animate, and sacred.
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In this conversation from our Shifting Landscapes exhibition, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is joined by Marshmallow Laser Feast creative director Ersin Han Ersin, one of the artists behind the exhibition’s large-scale installation, Breathing with the Forest, which invites you into an experience of exchanging breath with a forest in the Colombian Amazon. Talking about the ways MLF’s projects bring together science and imagination to illuminate the hidden connections within the living world, Ersin speaks to the power of sensory engagement, wonder, and awe to broaden our perception of more-than-human experiences.
Explore our special online adaptation of Breathing with the Forest.
Read the transcript.
Image courtesy of Marshmallow Laser Feast and Sandra Ciampone.
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When we step into a forest aware and listening to what surrounds us—remembering that the living world is just as aware of our presence—a relationship of reciprocity can take root. How might such a quality of attention change our ability to see, feel, and give ourselves to the landscapes around us? In this audio practice, writer and certified nature and forest therapy guide Kimberly Ruffin takes us on a sensory walk to meet the soil, sky, smells, and sounds of the forest. Encouraging us to “be a part of the music of a place,” this practice beckons us to witness, and be witnessed by, the living world. 
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Photo by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee.
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How would our response to the ecological crisis be different if we understood that our own consciousness is as wild as the breathing Earth around us? In this conversation, poet, translator, and author David Hinton reaches back to a time when cultures were built around a reverence for the Earth and proposes that the sixth extinction we now face is rooted in philosophical assumptions about our separation from the living world. Urging us to reweave mind and landscape, he offers an ethics tempered by love and kinship as a way to navigate our era of disconnection.
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How did the vast and varied chorus of modern sounds—from forests to oceans to human music—emerge from within life’s community? When did the living Earth first start to sing? In this immersive sonic journey, biologist and acclaimed author David George Haskell opens our senses to unexplored auditory landscapes through spoken words and terrestrial sounds, tuning our ears to the tiny, trembling waves of sound all around us. Hearing three billion years of our planet’s sound evolution in the trills, bugles, clicks, and pulses of the life around him, David invites us into the space of connection with deep time and the more-than-human world that opens when we tune in to the Earth’s orchestra.
If you enjoy this audio story, check out David’s companion practice, Playful Listening, which invites you to immerse yourself in the sonic world around you. And listen to our interview with David, “Listening and the Crisis of Inattention,” on our website.
Illustration by Daniel Liévano.
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