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.

In the near future, we're going to need ways of being that help us navigate a season of immense ecological loss,

while also making room for the possibility

of renewal and regeneration.

When faced with extinction and inhospitable landscapes, will we be able to reimagine our ways

of knowing and caring for the living world?

This week's story is called Tortestation, a short speculative fiction by acclaimed author

Lydia Millett, following a team of caretakers striving to save the old ones, an ancient species

of desert tortoise nearing extinction.

Amid devastating temperatures, invasive species, and ethically destabilized human structures,

the carers try to track and feed these beings as they traverse a fragile landscape in search

of a mate.

Told with the eyes of a carer who feeds weakened female tortoises brought into captivity, this

story explores what is caught in the crosshairs of our will to steward and our capacity

to destroy.

And if we have the courage to reimagine care for the earth, not as perfect or heroic, but

patient and rooted in steadfast attention and devotion.

During their long walks, the females are dots on the map,

slowly moving across a landscape of dry washes and desert vegetation.

...