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.

The promise of economic prosperity by means of taming the wilderness

set us on a trajectory toward ecological

disaster.

In this essay, Deegan Miller, author of This Radical Land, a Natural History of American

Descent, visits the tree that marks the thousands westward mile of the transcontinental railroad, considers

how our historical landmarks have shifted in meaning, leaving us adrift and disoriented

in the Anthropocene.

It is difficult to undo our own damage and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.

Annie Dillard, teaching a stone to talk.

We are of the shadows, not for us the resolution of old night, nor the revelation of high noon.

Of the shadows, but on the banks of a river that has spent ages slowly carving a canyon

through a range now called the Wasatch, before spilling into the flats of the Great Basin,

which hemps its dozens of wandering rivers in.

None ever make it to the sea.

We are on the banks of the Weber,

a white name given about 200 years ago, to the flowing water at our feet. This Weber River never reaches the ocean either, and instead it shimmies its way northwest from where we stand, then skirts the

small city of Ogden, 40 miles north of Utah's capital, to eventually mix its snowmelt

with the old brine of the Great Salt Lake, from where it will ascend back to the country of clouds.

...