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This is Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chidea. For the month of January, we're bringing you

independent voices from the podcasting world in our series Our Body Politics Presents. Each week, you'll hear a different show take us on a journey of both news and information and narrative sound.

This week, we're featuring the work of As She Rises, a podcast from Wonder Media Network that opens up space to breathe through the trauma of the climate crisis.

It's infused with poetry as well as science and history, and host and producer Grace Lynch

focuses on the journeys of indigenous women and women of color across the United States from

Hawaii to Minnesota.

We start with an excerpt of the very first episode of As She Rises, centered on Louisiana, the Bayou. Come on, wait a minute, you're in the wall. Come on, doll. You're drop. The story. The story survived upstream of me.

This.

The river bloated, turned outward on itself.

A breakthrough wide, a more natural state.

Forget the walls, the artificial banks, setting a thin route south into the Gulf. River found its mouth lacking, made itself big to accommodate the search.

Water by volume. Water by the ton for miles, fills its container, won't be kept out. I grew up at the base of the sailish sea in Olympia, Washington. Instead of running around lawns or bicycling on

sidewalks, I spent my childhood roaming the tidal flats. Recently when I was home, I was standing out in the

water with my dad, looking down at the sand dollars at my feet, and he said, you know, Grace, I haven't seen a starfish here in years.

It almost sounded like a line from a cheesy horror film,

a la, she's been dead for a thousand years, or something like that.

But unfortunately, climate change and its far-reaching tentacles are far from fiction.

...