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.

Earlier this month, we released a special multimedia feature called They Carry Us With Them,

exploring the migration of trees, and what is its stake for both ecological and human communities as forests move.

Following up from last week's story on The Black Ash,

staff writer Chelsea Steinerauer Scudder shares three tree three tree migration minions about three different tree species.

Sugar maple, paper birch, and red spruce.

Stories of tree migration are stories of all that is held by trees, and all that stands to be lost when a species moves away from the places and people who have folded that tree into their way of life.

In this way, every story of tree migration is a cultural, as well as an ecological

story. When I was researching this story, I wanted to understand what it is that trees carry

with them when they leave. The environmental factors at play and the human communities involved

may vary, but as a forest changes, it seemed,

it always tugs at far-reaching strands of connection and relationship.

The migrations of sugar maple, paper birch, and red spruce are three complex and nuanced stories,

but are shared here as short vignettes, each offering a

glimpse of just one aspect of tree migration, respectively, nourishment, forest succession,

and industry.

Sugar maple

In mid-March, nearing the spring equinox, the days begin to warm in West Newfield, Maine.

The sun reflects off the crusted ring of packed snow that is beginning to sink towards the base of her trunk

...