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.

Extinction, in its broadest sense, is a natural occurrence.

Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, species emerge and die out as part of the

passage of evolution.

The vastness of these millennial time spans allows ecosystems to slowly replace what is lost

when a species disappears.

But in an age punctuated by rapid warming, pollution and habitat destruction, The rate of extinction is speeding up to such a pace that ecosystems can no longer replenish the holes that appear in their fabrics.

Their delicately balanced cyclical processes are becoming upended, edging them ever closer to collapse.

Histories of insidious violence towards other species

have converged into a present defined by human wrought extinctions.

What stories, what voices, what beauty have we struck from the earth?

What voids are left?

What gapes wear further in the tapestry of the living world.

In this short story, acclaimed novelist Lydia Millett imagines the plight of the last remaining

Tasmanian tiger, a creature caught in the crosshairs of Australia's settler narrative,

eventually hunted to the point of extinction. As a man seeks the company

of the tiger, housed in a failing zoo, he summons the courage to care for what remains

amid an overwhelming sorrow for what has been lost. Twice a day he could feel peaceful in the house when the tension of grieving ebbed from his body.

The muscles loosened, inside their sheaths of tissue,

...