Beings Seen and Unseen – A Conversation with Amitav Ghosh

In his book The Nutmeg’s Curse, scholar Amitav Ghosh writes, “the planet will never come alive for you unless your songs and stories give life to all the beings seen and unseen that inhabit a living Earth,”—seeding a shift in consciousness begins with the stories we tell. In this wide-ranging interview from our archives, Amitav explores the themes of his recent work, including the insidious philosophy that the Earth is inert and how this belief paved the way for the implementation of violent projects around the globe, such as the genocide of Indigenous people and the monolith of capitalism. Unpacking the rise and legacy of an ideology of mastery, Amitav asks, if such conquests were made possible by the narrative of an inanimate Earth, what stories can now be imagined to help us recognize the world as sacred and alive?  Read the transcript Photo by Sumit Dayal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can we learn to be with the grief that arises within as we witness the destruction being wrought upon the Earth? When we are broken open by the pain of loss, how can we hold and work with the seeds of despair, but also love, that flood into that space? This week, we revisit “Thylacine,” a short story by American novelist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet that imagines the twilight of the last remaining Tasmanian tiger, a creature caught in the crosshairs of Australia’s violent colonization. As a man mourns the death of his mother, he seeks the company of the tiger housed in a failing zoo. Turning to face the loss that begins to swell through the zoo like a plague, he summons the courage to care for what remains amid an overwhelming sorrow for what will inevitably disappear. Read the story  Find “Thylacine” and other Short Stories of Apocalypse, in our inaugural print fiction collection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In December last year, Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam’s short film Lost World screened at our Shifting Landscapes exhibition in London. Kalyanee’s films tenderly document the changing cultural and ecological landscapes of her homeland, and in Lost World she shares the story of a community in Koh Sralau whose livelihoods are threatened as the mangrove forests they depend on are ruthlessly mined for sand to build an “eco-park” in Singapore. In this conversation, recorded live at the exhibition, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks with Kalyanee about her years-long process of creating the film, and the intimate relationships she holds with people and land that allow her to tell powerful, and often heartbreaking, stories of changing landscapes from a place of humility and connection.  Read the transcript  Watch Kalyanee’s short film Lost World and read her companion essay Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This talk was a keynote given by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee during a conference on spiritual ecology and peace building at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in July. It explores how spiritual ecology is fundamentally a memory of living in kinship with the Earth that must be reawakened if we are to embody a spiritual connection with the living world. Turning to praise and prayer, and the many forms they take, as ways to return to this sacred relationship, Emmanuel calls us to sweep the dust of our forgetfulness and hold the Earth in our hearts with love Read the transcript. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This short story, written by Andri Snær Magnason for our third print edition, follows an architect in Reykjavík grappling with the growing discord between his creativity and a capitalist reality. Laying bare the ways narratives of control and human supremacy can manifest in the physical objects we make, “Giantstone” asks us to consider what new stories could begin to shape our inner and outer worlds. Will we remain stuck in our humancentric philosophies, or will our art come to reflect a way of life that keeps and cares for the Earth? Read the short story. Watch the film The Last Ice Age, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the third in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series. Illustration by Juan Bernabeu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The warming of the planet is ushering in changes on a mythological scale. Oceans heat up, ice shelves melt, great floods swallow landscapes, ancient forests are reduced to ash. In this interview from our archive, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason speaks about how such incomprehensible changes are accelerating geological timescales. Instead of playing out over millennia, vast transformations of the Earth are now happening in the span of a lifetime, and in rapid succession. An accompaniment to The Last Ice Age—the third film in our Shifting Landscapes film series—this conversation with Andri explores how we can shift our sense of time to comprehend an uncertain future with greater clarity. Drawing on poetry, memories, stories from his grandparents, and language that infuses meaning into the data-led narrative of the climate crisis, Andri turns to the power of mythology to help us comprehend both the loss and possibility of our moment. Read the transcript. Watch the film The Last Ice Age, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the third in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series. Photo by Gassi Olafsson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ChatGPT has divided opinion on how artificial intelligence might shape our future: Is it a harbinger of our demise? Or a friend, arrived just in time to guide us through our collective unraveling? As we entangle ourselves with this technology, are there ways we can use it to transform our intelligence, rather than simply replicating it? In this week’s essay, writer and adaptive leadership trainer Dana Karout pokes fun at the ways ChatGPT mirrors our own limited ways of thinking. Drawing on her work helping communities navigate conflict and complexity, she pushes us to resist regurgitating what we already know in situations that demand new ways of being. As we try to address the existential challenges mounting around the world—ecological, social, spiritual—could ChatGPT’s empty spiels help us let go of our certainties? What true creativity, what real responses to our moment of crisis, might emerge from our unknowing? Read the essay. Illustration by Vartika Sharma. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last week we released Aloha ‘Āina, the second film in our Shifting Landscapes documentary film series, which tells the story of how acclaimed Native Hawaiian poet Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio brought her poetry and love of the land to the forefront of the movement to protect the sacred Mauna Kea from the construction of a thirty-meter telescope. To complement the film, we’re returning to an investigative story we published several years ago when moves to begin construction first ignited protest at the foot of the mountain. Written by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, this story—rich with the voices and chants of Mauna Kea land protectors—traces the collision of values that continues to play out on the mountain, giving a depth of context to the promise of guardianship maintained by the Kanaka Maoli community. Read the transcript. Watch the film Aloha ‘Āina, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the first in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series. Photo by Kapulei Flores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Although the ecological sphere has long declared the need for a shift in consciousness if we are to survive the myriad crises we’ve ignited, this conversation often lacks examples of what this change in consciousness might be like as a lived, embodied experience. This week, author of the cult classics The Brothers K and The River Why, David James Duncan, joins the podcast to speak about his new epic novel, Sun House—a story following the journeys of an eclectic collection of characters, each seeking Truth and meaning, who come together to form an unintentional community in rural Montana. David talks about the impetus behind the novel to impart an experiential model of contemplative inner life that might help navigate a future of social, cultural, and ecological unraveling that looms large. Wide-ranging and tender, the conversation explores how the wisdom of the great mystics—from Zen master Dōgen to the thirteenth-century Christian theologian Meister Eckhart and the Beguines—can be relevant in uncovering responses to the crises we face. Read the transcript. Photo by Chris La Tray. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Read the transcript. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices