Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel 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 Marin County.

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

connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Last week, we released Aloha Aina, the second film in our Shifting Landscapes Film series,

featuring the work of acclaimed Native Hawaiian poet,

Jamaica, Osorio, and shares the story of how she brought her poetry and love of the land

to the forefront of the fight against the construction of a 30-meter telescope on the summit of the volcano, Mauna Kea, on the island of Hawaii.

In tandem with this film, we're re-sharing an investigative story we published several years ago on the collision of values unfolding on the Mauna.

Written by Chelsea Steinerauer-Skutter, this story gives an in-depth perspective to the promise

of guardianship, maintained by

Jamaica and her community, tracing the ongoing discord for what is deemed sacred in this landscape.

Nearly 14,000 feet above sea level, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on the island of Hawaii,

there is a place of snow and ice where the wind is sharp and wisps of cloud are alive in the air,

illusions of breath where there is little. The land is otherworldly,

iron-red and yellow and black, interspersed with the white of packed snow reflecting the strong sunlight. Cinder cones peppered with rocks rise from the undulating surface of the expansive

summit, with slopes that taper until they fold into

the shallow circles of the small black craters at their peaks. These were the last parts of

the mountain to erupt long ago, before the volcano fell dormant. The mountain began its slow and dramatic rise from the seafloor over one million years ago

as the Pacific tectonic plate moved over a volcanic hotspot

and lava erupted underwater from fissures in the earth's crust.

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