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.

How does any living thing know when it's the right time to emerge into the world?

A peach swelling on its branch, a garlic bulb growing in winter soil,

a new life forming inside a mammalian body.

Each of these flourishings are only so because of a convergence of signals,

genetic instructions from within, and environmental cues from the world around us. But what happens when

the conversation falters, as the seasonal markers that once signaled safe growth become

unreliable or absent? This week's essay by climate journalist Zoe Schlanger explores what happens when the memory of winter,

a period of cold called vernalization that is essential to generating growth and is encoded

in a plant's molecular memory no longer aligns with seasonal realities. As vernalization periods shorten or lengthened frosts, these tweaks

in the seasonal timings distort everything that comes after. Spring flourishing goes subtly,

but horribly wrong, she writes, revealing just how much the annual re-emergence of life depends on the reliable

presence of coldness, darkness, and decay.

Entwining this story of increasingly out-of-sync plant timelines with her own experience

of misalignment between cultural adulthood and human biology as she journeys towards becoming

a parent.

So he wonders, how will we adapt and evolve in a world where the age-old and fragile conversations

between the biological clocks of all living things are being rewritten?

...