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.

Imagine a world where the mountains and glaciers, trees and waterways and animals,

everything comprising our living, breathing planet, or granted legal rights.

Imagine forests protected from clear-cutting, polluted rivers, awarded compensation,

landscapes defended in court from destruction. While in reality, these codes largely don't exist

within the framework of U.S. law, the principles

that underlie them have been recognized by indigenous cultures around the world since time

and memorial, and inform a growing rights of nature movement that seeks justice and protection

for the living world.

As the ecological crisis deteriorates, how might we apply our legal system to the defense

of our suffering planet?

What frameworks might bear equality for our creaturely neighbors and the lands that hold

us?

In this narrated essay, author and journalist Boyce Uphold travels to meet with the autumn people of the Sonoran Desert,

who have long revered the saguaro cactus as a being with personhood.

As saguaroos are bulldozed to make way for a segment of the U.S.-Mexico border wall through organ pipe cactus National Park,

existing legal protections for the cactus come up against

human-centric and extractive attitudes toward the Earth.

Talking with elders from the Tihona Otom Nation, who are acting on behalf of the human

beings of the desert, voice wonders how our Earth might transform if we recognized the dignity

...