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.

What will our world look like in a decade?

In two or three?

The forests, rivers, rainfall, soils, the rich fabric of the places we inhabit.

The whole living world is changing beyond our grasp.

As much disappears, is lost or degraded.

We remain enamored with the industrial, the human, the fruits of progress and profit.

Already we are steering towards a future colored by AI,

genetically modified species, and carbon capture. Already, artificial landscapes are forming

at the nexus of technology, consumerism, and the accelerating climate catastrophe. Instead

of changing our relationship with the Earth, we continue to change

all that exists around us. What dangers may arise if we create things only in our likeness

and for our benefit? What strange and illusory realities will come into being if you respond

to extinction and loss by desperately recreating all that disappears.

This week, acclaimed author Nathaniel Rich invites us to step into a story that blurs the line

between science fiction and our emerging futures. In Hidden Bayou, a field biologist follows an endangered eastern black rail through a man-made

climate mitigation project, funded by a multi-billion dollar corporation.

When a surprising meeting disrupts the artifice of the landscape, he is left to confront

his role in an engineered world.

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