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.

Melanie Challenger is an environmental philosopher who works as a researcher and broadcaster on the history of

humanity and the natural world. She is the author of On Extinction, How He Became a Strange from Nature,

and How to Be Animal, a New History of What It Means to Be Human. In this essay, Melanie examines the belief in human exceptionalism

that has devastated life on this planet

and wonders if our desire to outrun death

is hindering our capacity to love.

One, meeting death. I met death in my early 20s. I had already lost loved ones before this time.

A friend at school was taken by leukemia in a breathtaking six weeks one strange hot summer.

My grandfather Eric and my uncle Tim both died before their time.

But none of us truly meets death until we are ready to understand what it means.

My first meeting came while sitting in a recording studio with a Holocaust survivor called Hannah.

Hannah had endured the death march from her home in Hungary when she was 15 years old.

In 1944, she and her family members were transported by cattle truck to Walshvitz.

Out of dozens of family members, only she and her brother came through the war alive.

We were doing interviews together for radio stations around the country on Holocaust Memorial Day.

As the interviewers asked us questions, we both did our best to respond.

Hannah was a practised educator and skilled at relating what was necessary of her trauma.

And what she said on air was harrowing.

Yet Hannah was willing to share only so much among strangers.

...