Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people in present-day Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

California, as we know it today, an agricultural powerhouse, home to some of America's most iconic and densely populated cities, and the

fifth largest economy in the world, is built on one of the most extensive water delivery

systems on Earth.

Developed over the past century, intricate web of reservoirs, dams, power stations, and

gravity-defying pipes has enabled water to be moved from one

end of the state to the other. Los Angeles, for example, is built on the edge of a desert, import 75%

of its water from distant sources, the Owens River, the heavily siphoned Colorado River, and the Sacramento

River, hundreds of miles to the north.

In defiance of this place's hydrological limitations, humans have rearranged California's natural resources

to make real a vision of economic and social prosperity across the state, and in doing so,

have rendered the land unrecognizable from its pre-settlement form.

In this week's story, writer and facilitator Maya Pace confronts the long-standing utilitarian

mindset that has driven California to exploit the natural resources of one place in order to build

a paradise elsewhere.

When her comfortable perception of her home is shattered in the wake of the state's 2020 wildfires,

replaced by a glimpse of how fire, aridness, and unpredictability has been repressed in this landscape

by the movement of water, Maya begins to search for what it means to love a place that is no longer

recognizable. An experience that is increasingly common as homes across the globe are transformed

...