Currently streaming on the Emergence Magazine website, Shifting Landscapes is a poignant, unmissable four-part documentary series, directed by Emmy- and Peabody-nominated filmmakers Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, exploring the power of art and story to orient us amid the darkness of climate catastrophe.

Most recent addition to the series, The Last Ice Age follows storyteller Andri Snær Magnason, as he retraces his grandparents’ annual spring pilgrimage to Iceland’s Vatnajökull glacier. Climate change, says Andri, is like a black hole: so big it’s larger than language. We understand it not by looking straight at its center, but by looking at its edges. Andri searches for the stories that lie at the edges of our climate crisis in both scientific data and his family’s memories. Witnessing the inevitable decline of Europe’s largest ice cap with his son Hlynur, Andri pulls on the ties of love that connect past and future generations to grasp what the immense changes he has seen in just one lifetime will mean for the future of the planet.

The Last Ice Age comes after The Nightingale’s Song — in which award-winning folk singer Sam Lee draws on a lineage of traditional folk music to join the extinction-threatened bird in a spontaneous duet — and Aloha ‘Āina — in which acclaimed Kanaka Maoli poet and activist Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio immerses us in a love for and of the land embodied by her poetry, her family, and the movement at the foot of Mauna Kea, as she fights to protect the sacred mountain from the construction of a thirty-meter telescope.

Next month will see the addition of the final film in the series, Taste of the Land, in which filmmaker Kalyanee Mam journeys to the threatened forests of Cambodia’s Areng Valley, and into a spiritual and ancestral relationship to place that deepens her sense of belonging with the land.