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.

Around the world, trees are on the move.

Last year, we published a special multimedia story that explores what is at stake for

both ecological and human communities as forests migrate, told from the perspectives of

four native tree species.

And this re-release of They Carry Us With Them.

Staff writer Chelsea Steinauer Scudder narrates this feature story,

chronicling the possible disappearance of the black-ass tree from the state of Maine. When I learned that trees migrate and that climate change is both accelerating and hindering that migration,

it shifted my understanding of the ways in which the climate crisis is bringing unprecedented change to many of our ecologies and our homes.

That our trees, these beings who we rely upon to be resilient in their rooted ways, might be leaving, might be climate refugees in their own way, felt both deeply painful and haunting.

What is at stake, I wondered, when our home landscapes change around us?

How do we bear witness? How do we bid farewell?

In this essay, I embark on a journey to understand the migrating forests of Maine,

exploring how every story of tree migration is an ecological as well as a cultural story. As the

emerald ash borer makes its way across the country, erasing the range of the black ash tree,

I met with several Wabanaki black ash basket makers in Maine

who are carrying forward generations of cultural knowledge through their art.

As the boar calls the existence of the black ash tree into question,

these cultural knowledge keepers grapple with what is at stake as the black ash tree disappears.

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