Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Thank you. culture and spirituality. Paul Kingsnorth is a writer living in rural Ireland. He is the author of numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including the novels

The Wake and Beast, the essay collection Confessions of a Recovering

Environmentalist, and Songs from the Blue River, his most recent collection of poetry. In this essay,

Paul faces his suspicion that modern written language, our most effective tool of communicating,

reasoning, and abstraction is in fact a tool of eco-sive. As with all of Paul's

work, this essay takes a critical look at our civilization and the aspects that we take to be

foundational to our modern world. Here, he puts to question the very impulse of our speech.

What defines a human? What is the essence of what we are? Perhaps it is the ability and the desire to ask questions like that.

At some level, the culture inhabited by people like us, people who read, who write, who think, who worry,

who accept these questions as valid, is a culture of separation, an orthodoxy of subject and object.

Something separates us from them, where us is homo-sapiens, a species of upright hominid, and them is every other

living being that inhabits this living earth. What is the source of this separation? Is it God?

Where are we created to be different, to be masters or stewards? Did we evolve our differences?

Why do we think we're different anyway? Is it

because we're the only species that writes essays? These are circular questions. Like

the earth and its seasons, they never stop turning.

What is the dividing line between us and them? Is there one at all? In one sense, no. We are

a primate species, virtually genetically identical to our closest hominid relative, the chimpanzee.

We share many of their behavioural characteristics and have much in common with other mammals,

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