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.

From our self-endowed perch at the apex of sophisticated speech, we often construe the absence of language as a dearth of cognitive function,

a signal of rudimentary perception.

Similarly, we consider silence to be a hollow space, one empty of exchange or dialogue.

A voice only becomes a voice when we can understand it on our terms.

And so the vocal, gestural, and sensory expressions of the more than human world have been muzzled,

exile to the realm of the uncommunicative and the unintelligent.

But if we listened to these voices, both audible and silent, might we rethink our relationships

with other species?

In this week's narrated essay, writer and ethicist Melanie Challenger acknowledges the expressive

capacities, the glorious idiosyncratic aliveness of the Earth's non-human creatures and wonders how we might create

democratic processes that listen for and value their voices. Advocating for a quieting of

our own narratives so that we might recognize political signals from the behaviors of the

vast community around us.

She envisions the revolutionary mechanisms which could make present the expressions of animals

within our systems of power.

As she asks why we have made ourselves so special that we have excluded the voices of other creatures,

Melanie calls us to remember we are not the only

lives on the planet that we matter.

Come with me into the forest that is now only a forest in my dreams, and it is often in my dreams these days.

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