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.

This month, we're taking time to rest in the ashes, with five stories from chapter

two of our new

Prince edition, living with the unknown.

When so much has been stripped away, how do we continue to be present with that which remains?

How do we bear witness to ruin?

We begin with the sudden disappearance of the Bogong Moth in Alpine Australia.

As writer Rebecca Giggs considers how very small beings are often responsible for vast

searches of life. She follows the rapidly vanishing trail of the Bogong on a journey from

superabundance to apocalyptic end.

The moths, when they came, were said to appear first like sea fog, massing above the ocean.

Lighthouse keepers along the southeastern edge of Australia

warned of beacons so darkly swarmed that on-water navigators doubted their bearings.

Ferry boats were burdened by thousands, wings a blur.

Some moths hung in clusters off the precipitous coastal cliffs,

living icicles, dripping with more moths.

The moths as a myriad moved in.

At nightfall they swept over the suburbs in clouds,

wrote one reporter for a Sydney tabloid,

...