Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Our podcast features in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories,

exploring the threads, connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

David Abram is a cultural ecologist and philosopher. He is the founder and creative director

of the Alliance for Wild Ethics and the author of numerous books, including Becoming Animal,

and Earthly Cosmology, and the Spell of the Sensuousuous, perception and language in a more than human

world. In this episode, David narrates his essay Creaturally Migrations on a Breathing Planet. Through

his observations of Sand Hill cranes, monarch butterflies, and Pacific salmon in the course of their

annual migrations, David questions the deep intelligence that lies in the course of their annual migrations. David

questions the deep intelligence that lies at the heart of migration patterns.

In the summer of 1988, I found myself kayaking in the Prince William Sound of Alaska,

a few months before the undulating surface of that life-filled sea was generously layered

with a glistening blanket of oil by the Exxon Corporation.

A suburban kid from Long Island, this was my first time in the far north, and I was

stunned by the colossal scale of the place, by immense glaciers calving off icebergs into the

waters around me, by the preponderance of eagles who seemed to glare down at me from every

overhanging branch and snag. I had beached my kayak on one of the

larger islands for the night, and after a simple meal I went off walking along the coast as the

sun was slipping down toward the horizon. I was drinking the salt air and listening to the

lapping of the small waves and the wind in the needles.

After some time, I came to the edge of a surging stream about twelve feet across,

...