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.

Tristan McConnell is a writer who spent years working as a foreign correspondent in Nairobi.

In this article, Tristan travels to Turkana in northwest Kenya, home to Kenya's Rift Valley, the place where,

millions of years ago, our first human ancestors emerged and then dispersed in waves out of the continent.

Present-day Turkana is a place that continues to be defined by human migration.

As he meets with archaeologists, pastoralists, and activists,

Tristan considers the ways in which climate and landscape will continue to shape our presence on this planet.

Part 1, Morisipo Hill.

At the foot of a ridge of successive hills, sparsely wooded with thorny acacias,

lies a plain of shrubs, sand and gravel.

The sun overhead is relentless, the sky cloudless, as it has been for months now.

It is June, the depths of the dry season, the land arid as an abandoned well, the hot wind,

an empty promise.

Cast in relief against the austere beauty of the land

is a dark volcanic outcropping to the distant north that is visible for many miles in every

direction, while to the east shimmers the haze of late Takana, a body of water that sprawls across

northern Kenya like a sluggish crocodile. In this part of the country, there are no paved roads,

no piped water, no electricity poles, no brick buildings, no school, no shops, and no crops.

The landscape is coursed with dry riverbeds prone to long droughts and occasional floods. There is

hot sand underfoot and thorns on every branch and stem.

...