What Guides Alaskan Salmon, Sandhill Cranes, and Monarch Butterflies Across Earth?
This Week from the Emergence Magazine Podcast
Emergence Magazine is an online publication with annual print edition exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories and more.
In this week’s narrated essay, cultural ecologist and geophilosopher David Abram conjures the impossible movements of Alaskan salmon, sandhill cranes, and monarch butterflies on their annual migrations, marveling at the reciprocal interactions that guide these creatures across the wider body of the Earth. What if, David asks, we understood migration as emerging from a conversation—a spontaneous reciprocity—between migrating creatures and the environments they migrate within? How might we humans, whose senses have coevolved with the enfolding biosphere, begin to recognize ourselves, too, as expressions of the animate, breathing Earth?
________________________________
Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.
David Abram, PhD, cultural ecologist and geophilosopher, is the founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics. His books include Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. David is currently the Senior Fellow in Ecology and Natural Philosophy at Harvard Divinity School.
