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.

About 34 million years ago, the Antarctic ice sheet began to form.

Newly separated from the northern continents and with global temperatures rapidly

dropping, Antarctica became a frozen landscape. Millennia of unmelted snowfall turning into

glacial ice. It had an identity, a way of being, an ancient story to tell. Yet in 1820, through our pioneering gaze, we saw it as a land void of meaning.

A pure white slate waiting to be known, ready to be inscribed with human ideas.

Over the course of our relationship with Antarctica, a mere 200 years, it's become a frontier

to be conquered, a proving ground for masculinity and a barometer for our climate crisis.

And while we now strive to learn more about its geological past and possible future, we still

label it barren, dangerous, and beautiful.

Visiting the Ross Ice Shelf across several seasons,

writer Stephanie Criswanas asks us what would happen if we instead approached Antarctica

as a living place with agency.

As he interrogates heroic narratives of the continent,

written almost entirely by white men,

that gender the land through feminine tropes,

Stephanie wonders how such stories shape and ethics of relationship

to the non-human world.

Reaching beyond binaries and savior complexes, she dismantles our fantasies of Antarctica

...