Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Amad Jamal Johnson is an award-winning poet and the author of Dark Town Follies and Red Summer.

Raised in the treeless landscape of Los Angeles, submerged in the light of the sun and the heat of wildfires, Ahmad grew up with the belief that the world was burning.

In this essay, he revisits his turn to poetry as a young adult who was attempting to locate a language for the blurred lines between urban and environmental violence.

Now living in Wisconsin, the only black

members of their neighborhood, Amad and his family must decide whether to cut down the century-old

silver maple in their backyard, a choice that is at first glance about safety, but at its roots

about much more.

The sort of trees that knot and choke the light from the air.

Live Oaks and Poplars.

The source material of nightmares or the near comic,

nostalgia-written parodies of the Deep South,

were foreign to me growing up in Los Angeles.

The pencil-thin shadows of palm trees crosshatching the landscape in LA, like a second network of down power lines,

seemed both dangerous and decorative. They offered no comfort, no quarter, no sanctuary from the

heat. Everything was visible in that light,

what was beautiful or broken.

The light sprawled like the city,

suburb after suburb, unfolding relentlessly, from the Wilshire District to Compton to Orange County.

I don't know if it's strange to have a memory of childhood without shadows, without trees.

We felt submerged in light,

as if we were mostly bathing or drowning in it.

...