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.

Envisioning a future, colored by a worsening ecological crisis, makes for a dark and despairing picture.

It's easy to become overwhelmed with helplessness and fall into apathy,

but it's also possible to orient ourselves towards the beauty and opportunity within our uncertain future.

How can we find ways to keep our hearts open amid destruction?

How can we express an authentic love for the living world in ways that invite others into a space of reverence?

This week, we return to my 2021 conversation with Irish writer, naturalist, and activist Dara McAnulty,

who in his young life has already become a luminary of embodied joy in the ecological sphere.

As he wonders what the future might look like if we activate a change from a place of care rather than fear. Dara uplifts joy as an essential Diary of a Young Naturalist at the age of 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 and I hated every

second of it. Writing, on the other hand, I found incredibly easy to do. It was something that I could take what was going on in my mind and put it

...