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.

Faced with an accelerating climate crisis, our capacity for denial appears only to be deepening. Creatures great and small, our earthly kin, are confronted

with extinction. Fires burn across continents, the seas rise and rivers dry, and yet our potential

to implement real change diminishes as we refuse to take responsibility for the destruction we have caused.

Rather than returning to our stewardship of the earth, we instead continue to glorify profit and progress,

hoping something will save us before we reap what we have sown.

Amid such darkness, what futures can be born. As one world ends, will we find the will to usher in new ways of being.

In this short story, Booker Prize-winning Nigerian author and poet Ben Okre envisioned the tragedy and peace of a post-human world.

Twenty thousand years into the future,

an exploration of Earth

uncovers the final notes and unfinished stories

left by the last human beings in the twilight of their civilization.

Reflecting on humanity's genius for extraction and domination,

this uncanny tale, narrated by acclaimed British actor, Colin Salmon,

follows our trajectory into extinction and begs the question.

When will we truly comprehend the future we have seated?

Once upon a time, in a world that no longer exists, there was a planet with vast seas,

abundant forests, splendid continents, polar regions, and civilizations that evolved from remote

beginnings to an age of skyscrapers and digital revolutions.

...