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.

This week, we're featuring a favorite interview from our archives and sharing my conversation with the acclaimed

British writer Robert McFarlane. We originally spoke in 2019 as part of our language-themed

issue. Robert's many works include the books, underland, landmarks, and the lost words, and

the films upstream and mountain. He is also a fellow at Cambridge University. I always find

Robert's work to be a profound invitation to step into deep time, a space from which to explore

the memories that are held between the human and the more than human worlds. His words and stories

have a way of summoning you into landscapes,

transporting you into a profound relationship with place that stays with you, in both settling,

and in the case of his recent book, Underland, sometimes profoundly unsettling ways.

In our conversation, we spoke about his wide-ranging work, the lyrical relationship between

language and landscapes, and the consequence, responsibility, and the pleasure of naming the

living world. It's a pleasure to be speaking with you today and getting a chance to explore your work and this ongoing journey of the language of place that you have been developing for many years.

And I guess my first question is really a sense of where this comes from inside of you, because so much of your work

focuses on this relationship to the place and the connection to the landscapes, forests, waterways,

pathways, and other natural spaces in your home in the United Kingdom. And it almost feels as if you're developing or sharing a language of place, a way of using words

that creates a real intimacy for the reader with that place, even if you're thousands of miles away

like I am today. And I think one of the reasons it's so effective, and maybe this is my assumption, but,

is that I feel your connection and your relationship and your love of these places and these

landscapes so vividly. It comes through very strongly. And so I'm curious to learn a bit about

...