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.

This week's episode is The Aquarium, a short story by English novelist Daisy Hilliard that envisions the evolution of the

coastline of Scarborough, North Yorkshire, across deep time. Beginning in prehistory, as a meteor brings

life-generating minerals to a warm ocean, the tale takes us through the presence of early humans in this landscape.

An aquarium eerily devoid of fish in the 19th century.

Unexplained dead tides in the 2020s.

And into a future where the city is underwater and humans have evolved into a controversial hybrid marine species, drawn back to the cradle

of the sea to care for the degraded waters.

This story, narrated by acclaimed British actor Colin Salmon, is part of Wild Eye, a coastal

art and nature trail in Yorkshire, created by invisible dust and Yorkshire Wildlife Trust.

It calls us to pay attention to ways we have been,

are, and will always be entwined with the well-being of the sea,

for better or for worse,

and wonders how we will respond now to this role of stewardship.

One. Pre-history

Eons ago, before the seas had retreated, a lightweight black rock was travelling through space.

It breached a new planet's atmosphere and caught fire,

then fell to Earth in the ocean on the site of Scarborough Bay.

...