Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Jay Drew Lanham is a birder, naturalist, and hunter conservationist.

He is the author of The Home Place, Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature.

In this piece, based around a fictional exchange of letters,

Drew partakes in an exercise of convergent imagining,

as he envisions a world in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

And Rachel Carson crossed paths, bringing their respective visions of justice into conversation and weaving their missions into a common cause.

January 6, 1964.

Dear Miss Carson, Rachel, if I might, hoping you are well in these turbulent times,

I am fine but feel now pressed to do even more after this last attempt at silencing me came so close.

I became aware of you, Miss Carson, as your voice rings strong through the articles I've come across in various magazines.

Although I am not a bird watcher or naturalist, your passion for doing right by God's creation,

birds and humanity both strikes me as righteous in every sense of the word.

Measuring our moves by the urgent times we find ourselves in and the critical nature

of enlarging the just message of charity and care to every living soul,

I felt compelled to reach out.

I'm inquiring to find out if you might be willing to travel south to join me at a wondrous place

deep down in the South Carolina Low Country.

This place, the Penn Center, is in the heart of history both bitter and sweet.

...