Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

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

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Thank you. and spirituality. Elizabeth Rush is the author of Still Lives from a Vanishing City, and Rising, Dispatches from the New American Shore, which was a finalist for this year's Pulitzer Prize.

In Atlas with shifting edges, we find her driving

north along the California and Oregon coasts, where she encounters scenes that depict an altered

present and foretell an uncertain future. With smoke from forest fires obscuring the mountains

and burnt trees left standing on the hillsides. She passes the miles,

reflecting on how climate change is not only transforming our landscapes, but our words as well,

as we seek to grasp a shifting reality. So it was in summer again, the loved ones went out to the sea at a quarter to dusk.

The part of them that could do nothing did nothing, and the light of them walked along.

From Brenda Hillman's poem for a national seashore.

Mile Zero At the car rental counter, the clerk asks me if I am sure I want to downgrade my Dodge Challenger to a Volkswagen Beetle.

You paid for a premium vehicle, he says, trying to make me understand that I am throwing money away.

But the Volkswagen will be more fun to drive, I say. The attendant circles the silver car twice,

looking for dents, and I follow him, feeling like slightly less of a fraud. What I don't say is that my mind is a cleft thing,

one side calculating the carbon cost of running up the coast to promote my book on climate change,

the other strangely comfortable in the subterranean parking garage,

with its explorers, Grand Cherokees, beetles, and corollas.

Corolla is in the petals of a flower, the whirl that encloses the reproductive organs.

The clerk notes a couple things on his clipboard, then drops the keys into my open hand.

Mile 33

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