Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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Toward a Beautiful Rural Life
by Zhen Wang Jenny Chio’s book A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China attracted me because of its connection to my current research project at the Rachel Carson Center. One of the reasons for this is that we share the same research area—southwest China. My own research focuses on the…
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Environmental Knowledge and Environmental Politics in the “Post-Truth” Era
by Jonathan Clapperton and Liza Piper Nearly one year has passed since we wrote the introduction to the recently released RCC Perspectives volume titled “Environmental Knowledge, Environmental Politics: Case Studies from Canada and Western Europe.” At the time, we wrote in an atmosphere of environmental and progressive social activist optimism: the Paris Agreement had just…
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Snapshot: Latour de Force
*Featured image: Bruno Latour speaking at the Lunchtime Colloquium, 8 December 2016. What does it mean to be human in the Anthropocene? Put simply, we are disoriented: disoriented in space—aware that despite a united vision for the planet, no single space exists to accommodate all of our wishes; disoriented in time—living in an age stifled…
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“Key Debates in Environmental Anthropology”—A Report on the Inaugural Conference of the Environmental Anthropology Working Group
by Oliver Liebig On 26th and 27th September 2016, the Environmental Anthropology Working Group (a subgroup of the German Anthropological Association) met at the Rachel Carson Center for their inaugural conference. The meeting was convened to discuss the key debates and standpoints in environmental anthropology, as well as its diverse engagements with current environmental problems,…
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Doktorandentag 2016
By Anja Rieser and Ivan Vilovic With topics ranging from earthquakes to the League of Nations, greenhouse gases to photography, in fields as diverse as politics, law, geography, and art, the doctoral students at the Rachel Carson Center are a truly interdisciplinary group. On 7 November they convened for a “Doktorandentag,” a day of presentations…
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Worldview: Taking the Venice Architecture Biennale as an Example
by Jeroen Oomen This post was first published on 21 November 2016 on the ENHANCE ITN website. “What is the environmental humanities?” is a question that typically pops up whenever I care to explain that ENHANCE, the doctoral training network I am part of, stands for Environmental Humanities for a Concerned Europe. And in all…
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Snapshot: Human Evolution Workshop
By Christian Schnurr The evolution of the genus Homo was influenced in part by the landscape in which early hominins lived. Important archaeological sites are often located in areas with very rough terrain and a rich supply of nutrients and trace elements. These two features could have led wandering animals on paths where early hominins could…
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Marriage Trees
“My Tree in Another’s Backyard” By Anna Leah Tabios Hillebrecht The first half of September found me in Santa Fe, Argentina, as part of the academic exchange on Transatlantic Perspectives on the Rights of Nature, cosponsored by BayLat and the Rachel Carson Center. It was my first time in South America and I was determined to…