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.

Two years ago, one of the worst winter storms in history smothered Texas with ice and snow.

Unprepared for such extreme conditions, the state grid failed, plunging

millions into the dark and cold for days. Now known as the Great Texas Freeze, the storm was

for many a signpost, an undeniable portent of our climate future, and a stark revelation of

how ill-equipped we are to face rapid changes.

In this essay, author Lacey Johnson reflects on what can be rebuilt and what must be mourned

as their environment shift, fracture, and sometimes disappear.

Walking through a wetlands that was once an upscale neighborhood in Houston, Lacey comes into contact with the landscape transformed by oil extraction and subsidence,

one haunted by cycles of destruction.

After the freeze burst pipes in her home,

she examines the value of restoration in the aftermath of disaster

and considers what future could emerge, what places would survive,

if we didn't simply repair what is broken, but adapted to what lies ahead.

20 miles east of downtown Houston, where Buffalo Bayou and the San Jacinto River meet,

the Baytown Nature Center sits on a shifting landscape of wetlands and marshes, surrounded on three sides by Burnett, Crystal, and Scott Bayes.

Men toss fishing nets into shallow channels,

while herons and egrets rummage among the grasses for crawfish. Concrete rubble forms the shoreline.

Beyond it, flare towers and storage tanks and distillation columns of oil refineries line the horizon

as far as the eye can see.

...