Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people in present-day, Marine County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads

connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

In his book, The Nutmeg's Curse, Amitav Ghosh writes, The Planet will never come alive

for you unless your songs and stories give

life to all the beings seen and unseen that inhabit a living earth. I deeply resonated with this,

and Amitav's call to storytellers of all kinds to turn their attention towards centering the voices

and needs of the living world.

If we are to cede a shifting consciousness, it begins with the stories we tell.

This week, we are returning to my wide-ranging conversation with Amitav from 2022.

We delve into some of the main themes of Amitav's recent work,

speaking about the insidious philosophy that the earth is inert and lifeless, and how this belief

paved the way for the implementation of violent projects around the globe, such as the genocide of

indigenous people and the monolith of capitalism.

He stands firmly behind the idea that such colonial campaigns went hand in hand with eradicating the belief that spirit exists in all matter,

and remains the root cause of ecological crisis.

We unpack the rise and legacy of an ideology of mastery, and Amitav asked

the question that if such conquests were made possible by the narrative of an inanimate

earth, what stories can now be imagined to help us recognize the world as sacred and alive.

The Nutmeg's curse takes you on a remarkably deep journey into our collective past,

...