Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Dara Mukanalti is a teenage author, naturalist, and conservationist from Northern Ireland.

After several years of writing a blog, sharing his love of nature and his honesty about autism,

he published his debut book, Diary of a Young Naturalist, at the age of 14.

The book went on to win the 2020 Blainewright Prize from Nature Wright,

a book of the year for the narrative nonfiction British Book Awards in 2021.

I recently spoke with Dar, who was now 17 years old,

about his book and his approach to living a life immersed in and guided by the

living world. Wise beyond his years, Dara speaks about his identity as an autistic person. The

solace he is always found in nature, the role of the artist in envisioning a different future,

and the great necessity of staying rooted in joy.

Dara, you wrote your first book, Diary of a Young Naturalist at the age of 14 14 and you're 17 now, is that right?

Yeah, I'm 17 now.

And as I understand it, the book grew from a blog that you started writing when you were 12

years old. What initially prompted you to want to start writing publicly like this at such a

young age?

Well, I had been writing for a long time before that

point. Writing was a way for me to communicate. I didn't like to speak to people. In fact, I spoke to

basically nobody outside of close family. And any conversation I had outside of that was incredibly awkward

...