Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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The Origins of Ecocide
Post by Amy Hay In the fall of 2011, an unusual mock trial (see video below) took place, putting corporate leaders on trial for the crime of “ecocide.” Based on an imagined international law prohibiting the destruction of the natural environment, whether intentional or not, the case returned one verdict of not guilty for the…
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A Note on Recent Floods and Relocation in Australia
Post by Ina Richter The year 2013 is still fairly young but already there have been major natural disasters. Among these are the tremendous floods in the Australian states of Queensland and New South Wales, brought on by Cyclone Oswald. The cyclone had formed in the Gulf of Carpentaria just north of Australia. It was…
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Germany’s Great Green Gamble: Energy and Environmentalism in Transition
Post by Frank Uekoetter A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of the Energiewende. One of the leading industrial countries has decided to forgo nuclear power, staking its future instead on renewable energies, and the rest of the world is trying to make sense of the decision. And with that country being Germany, we have…
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Changing the Conversation with Ecofeminism: A Primer
Post by Jenny Seifert Changing a paradigm is no easy task—an understatement, no doubt. It probably seems just as easy as solving the world’s environmental problems. And shifting the paradigms that underlie those problems may seem like a doubly impossible task. Yet, the fate of humanity might hang on our ability to accomplish the impossible.…
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Photo of the Week – Grace Karskens
The Penrith Lakes Scheme area near Sydney, Australia, taken from Hawkesbury Lookout. The photo shows the surviving river flats and farms, the open cut gravel pits, the new lakes forming, the Nepean River on the right, and the foothills of the Lapstone Monocline (the Blue Mountains) in the foreground. (Please click the photo for a…
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Living with Zombie Mines
Post by John Sandlos and Arn Keeling Mention the words “zombie mine” and you risk conjuring images of grotesque undead figures lurking in dark abandoned tunnels, more the stuff of movie or video game fantasies than anything to do with mining in the real world. And yet, the idea behind the zombie – that of…
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Photo of the Week – Lawrence Culver
The Coachella Valley and adjacent Imperial Valley, both part of the Colorado Desert in southeastern California and northern Baja California, are located in one of the hottest and driest regions in the world. The Coachella Valley is home to Palm Springs and a number of other desert resort cities famed for lush golf courses and…
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Photo of the Week – Ingo K. Heidbrink
The remains of the Norwegian whaling station ‘Hector Whaling Company’ and the British Research Station ‘Deception Island – Base B’ at Whalers Bay on Deception Island were destroyed by volcanic eruptions in 1967 and 1969. Today they serve as a monument for the whaling history of Antarctica as well as for the exposure of all…
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Worldview: China’s Colorful Future
Post by Fei Sheng “Yellow” has a unique meaning in the Chinese conception of environment and society. We have always believed that our civilization—which, despite small interruptions, has never been significantly disrupted during the last 4,000 or even 5,000 years—is derived from the soil of our mother land, the Yellow Highland (Loess Plateau), and from…