Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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Corona Crisis, UNESCO and the Future: Do We Need a New World Heritage?
By Cornelius Holtdorf and Annalisa Bolin A virus has put the world on hold. Many individual human actions suddenly appear extremely small and insignificant in comparison with the unyielding might and relentless spread with which the SARS-CoV-2 virus is presently conquering Earth. We are witnessing how the virus does not distinguish between human hosts and…
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Cross-Species Conversations and the Coronavirus
By Serenella Iovino (translated by Elena Past) Zoonosis. This is one of the strange words that the onset of the coronavirus has forced us to learn. Zoonosis is a transitive infection, a virus that passes from animals to human beings. Or rather: it passes to our species from other animal species, recalling that human and…
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“You have to change your life!” Our Common Post-Corona Future through a Swedish Lens
By Sigurd Bergmann Once the coronavirus pandemic is over, we will wake up to a new society. Before everything gets better, however, everything will get worse—for a long time yet. We are faced with frightening images and stories of suffering in refugee camps, ill-equipped hospitals in poor countries, and the suffering of so many people…
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Is Covid-19 a “Capitalocene” Challenge?
By Jenia Mukherjee and Amrita Sen Rapid shifts across nine planetary boundaries, including deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and climate change, have occurred as a result of the Anthropocene. As recent advances in research suggest, political, economic, and technocratic interests drive global development enterprises. “Capitalocene,” a word used frequently now, emphasizes the palpable connections between planetary…
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Breath
By Kelly Donati In early January 2020, hitting the refresh button on The Guardian punctuated my waking hours as I obsessively tracked the movement of the bushfires from Munich. Watching from afar, sleep grew elusive. Just as I was meant to be drifting off, people along the east coast of Australia were waking up—if they…
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Canberra Dispatches
By Cameron Muir The smoke has been here hanging all day or blowing in of an evening for weeks now. The kids have been indoors most of this time. Even for the last two weeks of school, before the summer holidays, they were ordered to stay inside and spent their lunches and recesses in the…
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Summer’s Tempo: Bushfires, Water, and Time
By Ruth Morgan For me, the Savage Summer was televised, unfolding in my family’s living room in Perth and then a hotel room in Ooty in southern India. I’d expected locals there to ask me about cricket, but all they wanted to talk about were the bushfires that had seemingly engulfed the entire continent.
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The Strong Who Inspire: A Poem in Memory of Rachel Carson
This short guest post by award-winning nature writer Ellery Akers commemorates one of the worlds greatest conservationists and our intitute’s namesake, Rachel Carson. Carson died on 14 April 1964 at the age of 56. The poem, taken from Ellery’s new book Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance, has been reprodced here with her kind permission. By…
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The Fire Knows No Boundaries
By Rob Waters: Listen to a spoken-word poem about the fires and their impact on the land.