Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Thank you. culture, and spirituality. In this essay, staff writer Chelsea Steinauer Scudder considers how species extinction is related to religious and scientific predictions of a catastrophic future.

As the existence of the famed ivory-built woodpecker is increasingly left to the realm of myth,

she explores the widespread disappearance of birds through narratives of apocalyptic prophecy

that run through our collective consciousness. For in seven days I will send rain on the earth for 40 days and 40 nights,

and every living thing that I have made, I will blot out from the face of the ground.

Genesis 7.4. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world.

The people had done it themselves.

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

1. James Tanner was a graduate student at Cornell University when he was offered a three-year

Audubon Research Fellowship to study the famed

ivory-billed woodpecker in its native habitat. The fellowship would mean thousands of miles on the road,

hundreds more trudging on foot through swamps, filled with poisonous snakes, mosquitoes and

wolves, and little opportunity to settle down.

It also meant the chance to save a bird that until several years ago had been presumed extinct.

Jim didn't hesitate in saying yes. He had been an avid birder since he was a teenager.

He taught himself to mimic bird calls.

He learned to sit still for hours with his back against the trunk of a tree.

He trained a wounded golden eagle to hunt from his arm.

Long before he arrived at Cornell University, the ivory-billed woodpecker, Campophilus Principalis, had been disappearing across the United States. Increasingly rare sightings of this vanishing species

...