Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Meawak 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.

In a world rapidly spiraling into climate turmoil, the binding forces of nationalism and xenophobia

compel us to try to hold the world still,

immobilizing the currents of human migration that both shape and are shaped by the landscapes we inhabit.

The tale goes that we are safer this way, more secure, stable, but it forgets an important truth.

Movement is our oldest and most instinctive survival strategy,

one we have practiced since the very beginning of our existence.

As more and more of our homes are rendered uninhabitable by climate change,

will we remember how to move in tandem with our shifting landscapes?

Will we reorient to welcome migration, not only as a right, but a necessary human adaptation?

In this week's essay, writer Tristan McConnell ventures across Turkana and northwest Kenya, home of the Great Rift Valley,

a place where some of our earliest ancestors emerged millions of years ago before dispersing in waves first across and then out of the continent.

Encountering the legacies of these first humans through the lives of modern-day pastoralists,

anthropologists, archaeologists, and activists, Tristan considers the ways in which

Tercana's long story of migration and adaptation is still being written into the land.

As he discovers how deeply human movement, landscape, and survival

are entwined, he wonders what such a place might remind us about who we truly are and have

always been. Part 1, Morisipo Hill. At the foot of a ridge of successive hills, sparsely wooded with thorny acacias,

...