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.

Resting in the ashes of our present moment means examining the shadows of troubled histories.

In this essay, Daisy Hilliard, a scholar on the history of science,

examines three stories of atrocity and considers how whiteness has inscribed itself

onto the land through violence.

In what ways, she asks, does human history blur into the non-human world and into the present moment?

Part 1. Water

A while ago, in a nature documentary, I saw footage of a whale fall, the carcass of a sperm whale,

slowly sinking into those lightless depths of the ocean where the

aliens live. The deep sea caterpillars, the neon eels and the fish who wear headlamps.

In the abyssal zone, it's rare to have 30 tonnes of food drop from heaven. A team of six-gill

sharks arrived soon after the whale's body came to rest.

One by one, they drove themselves face first into its huge sides. They seemed to take turns doing so.

Each bite released a cloud of dim, red blood. And the sharks fed for days. After they had left, the footage showed

spider crabs and rock crabs creeping out over the corpse, which had, in the still water, taken on a

strangely woolly appearance. Pale innards ballooned through the larger wounds in the blubber. Time lapsed,

and then the footage showed the last edible scraps of whale flesh, covered with and surrounded by

tiny mites and grains, all feeding. Scabbard fish darted in and out to prey on the parasites.

Time lapsed again.

...