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, Marine County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

One of the things we've been thinking about a lot at emergence is how we can reimagine our most foundational structures

to sow a future different from the one of

ecological disintegration we're sailing towards.

If you're familiar with the work of research scientists Monica Gagliano, you'll know that

she offers a real example of what this reimagining and rebuilding of knowledge and scientific

structures can look like.

She is renowned for her pioneering work in plant communication and cognition,

and models how we can radically bridge the rigor of Western scientific methodology,

with a deeply human and also a spiritual act of listening to plants.

And I mean this quite literally.

For many years now, Monica's work and

experiments have been directly informed by interactions she has had with plants, and the knowledge

they have shared with her through dreams, conversations, sensations, and visions. And while her work

currently sits right on the precipice of what is accepted within

the temple of modern Western science, what I find most compelling about her work is she demonstrates

how being open, attentive, and approaching the earth with an attitude of humility doesn't

make Western science weaker. It can actually expand what we're able to see, feel, and understand.

To me, this feels radical, and a space where true emergence can take place,

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