Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Each week we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Lauren E. Oaks is the author of In Search of the Canary Tree. She is a conservation scientist and adaptation specialist with the Wildlife Conservation Society,

and an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth System Science

at Stanford University. While studying the consequences of climate change in a dying community

of yellow cedars in the Alaskan archipelago, Lauren found herself reaching for a language beyond

the scientific to explain the deep meaning she derived from the company of trees.

In this essay, we join Lauren as she moves beyond the observational lens of object-subject,

and finds relationship and a shared language of survival within the forest.

What did the tree learn from the earth to be able to talk with the sky?

Pablo Neruda Quircus species.

The coast live oaks, valley oaks, and black oaks along the western coast, eastern white oak, and

chestnut oak, back east where I grew up. Aser species, saccharum, the sugar maple in particular,

bursting autumn colors, and the taste of fresh syrup, the imprints of my childhood.

Pachalotropsis, Nucensis, the Alaska cedar or yellow cedar,

actually a cypress related to the giant sequoia.

This is the species I've obsessed over the most.

Swooping branches, foliage, and flat sprays, the wood inside so golden and tight-grained.

They are miraculous in form, elusive across their range.

I was first drawn to them because they are dying in our warming world.

In a closet, at home, three large boxes store a dozen journals of field notes and hundreds of

...