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 Marin County.

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

culture, and spirituality.

Trees are some of the Earth's most wondrous time capsules. Not only did they hold in their

concentric rings within their trunks, detailed records of their lives,

but should you reach out your hand in an all-growth forest,

you can touch a tree that was alive hundreds of years ago,

and is still alive today, and which may still be alive hundreds of years in the future.

In this piece, writer Robert Moore journeys to Haida Gwai, an island chain in British Columbia,

for the anniversary of a historic agreement between the Haida nation and the Canadian government

that protects the landscape's last remaining old-growth forests after decades of reckless logging.

As he walks through forests protected for generations by careful hideous stewardship,

Robert experiences the visible and tangible presence of deep time within each ancient tree.

He wonders how the lifespans of trees could not only help us bridge our present moment

with a deep past

and an uncertain future, but give us a pathway towards a compassion that radiates outwards

across time and space, for the lives of trees cut short by deforestation, for the generations

that may never experience the beauty of an old-growth forest.

One August day ten years ago, my husband and I attended a celebration in Haidaguay,

an island chain in British Columbia up near the Alaska border.

...