Welcome to the Emergence Magazine podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee,

host of this show recorded on the unseated lands of the Coast Mewak peoples in present-day Marin County.

In each episode, we explore the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality,

with the world's leading ecological thinkers, writers,

poets, and storytellers, through in-depth conversations, author-narrated essays, poetry, and nature-connection

practices.

When we increasingly prompt artificial intelligence to generate written work with just the click of a button,

we risk not only eroding our capacity to imagine and give form to ideas, but also reducing

writing to a mere product, stripped of the creative process that makes it alive, embodied, and meaningful.

In this week's sweeping story, nonfiction writer Stephanie Criswana's

pushes back at this encroaching future by offering a love letter to the labor of writing. Summending a chorus of

renowned voices evoking the struggle and joy of creating. Stephanie argues that it is through

engaging in such processes that we connect with the earth. When we dream, craft, refine, stall,

and rework to bring forth a piece of art, she says

we are miniature manifestations of the larger generative cycles and always unfolding creativity

of the earth.

Taking us through the many ways that ChatGBT is inherently extractive, she urges us to return to this connection,

to create in ways that regenerate life rather than depleted.

The past is everywhere.

Nessling in our genes, our proteins, our bones, and our algorithms.

We breathe it.

...