Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

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

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok 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. We've long been culturally besotted with the image of the solo human

genius. The idea that our creativity emerges from some nameless place within the mind.

But it's arguable that all art has been made collaboratively with the living world.

From our earliest creations we've mimicked the earth myriad forms and manifestations,

have extracted materials, minerals,

stones,

metals,

to make them,

and have been given gifts from the earth

in the form of inspiration.

Once your eyes become adjusted to seeing the living Earth's hand

in all we've created,

it also becomes clear that we continue to neglect, philosophically, spiritually,

and legally to recognize this.

In 2022, author Robert McFarlane, psychologist Juliana Ferci, musician Cosmo Sheldrick,

and legal scholar and more than human rights, or Moth Project founder,

Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, embarked on a field trip together to the Los Cedros Cloud Forest in Ecuador,

a landscape that was granted legal personhood and protection under a landmark rights of nature ruling by the Ecuadorian

...