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 Meawak people of present-day, Mering County.

Each week we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

The past decade has been punctuated by portents of apocalypse, which have both exposed the fragility

of our social structures and the vast inequalities that exist within them.

The pandemic, the rapid extinction of hundreds of species of plants and animals,

the swell of devastating natural disasters, are all warnings that our way of being in the world cannot hold.

While this truth is moving closer and closer to the center of our consciousness,

we are failing to realize meaningful transformation on a global scale.

And so, when our leaders and systems of power instead continue to operate staunchly and deliberately

within the status quo, where can we turn?

In this context of a faltering world,

acclaimed Australian Aboriginal author Alexis Wright

considers how her ancient culture, enduring since time immemorial,

has responded to ongoing destruction.

With native ecosystems and indigenous lifeways perpetually under threat, she turns inward

to the dwelling place of ancestral story, to a space where sovereignty of mind and imagination

carry forward systems of knowledge that ensure the survival of her people.

Understanding the intrinsic link between resilience and stories that regenerate the world we live in,

Alexis looks towards the future and calls upon storytellers to help usening, once wrote a gatha, or poem over a thousand years

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