Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people in present-day Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads

connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

This month, we premiered the third film in our new four-part shifting landscapes documentary film

series, looking at how art and story can orient us amid the darkness of our time.

This third film, The Last Ice Age's main subject, is Icelandic storyteller Andres

Nair Magnuson, whose powerful films and writing have been featured on emergence over the years.

I've long resonated with his belief in the power of mythology to help us comprehend both the loss and possibility of our moment.

This film explores just that, and journeys with Andre as he retraces his grandparents' annual spring pilgrimage

to Iceland's Vatma Jokal glacier, searching for the stories in scientific data and family memory

that might help him grasp the immense changes that are enveloping our planet.

Alongside the film's release, we're returning to a conversation I have when I first met

Andre back in 2019 in Iceland about the ways geological time is beginning to move at the speed of

human time as oceans heat up, ice shelves melt, and great floods swallow landscapes. Fast transformations that used to play out over millennia are now happening in the span of a lifetime and in rapid succession.

Considering how we can shift our sense of time and comprehend our uncertain futures with greater clarity,

we spoke about how a new mythology exploring what it means and looks like to live on an

animate Earth could usher in a paradigm shift.

Andre, you've had quite a varied career as a writer, an environmental activist, and even running for president of Iceland.

Yes.

And your work as a writer is just as varied, you know, from poetry and children's books to science fiction and nonfiction.

...