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.

Six weeks ago, the brilliant eco-philosopher and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy passed away at the age of 96.

Not only was she one of the most influential leaders in the field of deep ecology,

and an essential wayfinder of our time.

She was a dear friend, and her voice was one of the first we sought in our early publishing days.

She dedicated her life to the work that reconnects,

practices that return people to a sense of relationship

with the greater web of life.

And she created pathways through despair, anger, and apathy

that people felt towards social injustice

and ecological destruction,

helping alchemize these feelings into constructive change and action.

The strength of her love for the Earth,

and her ability to always see the opportunity within its ecological unraveling,

continues to move me.

Of her current polycrisis, Joanna said, the darker the circumstance, the more brilliant, the invitation.

And so, in honor of her passing and of the immense life she lived, we returned this week to her

interview with us from 2018. In our conversation, she traces the ways a lifelong heart connection with the living world

cultivated a resounding ecological awareness within her work. She explores how we might return to an

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