Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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Gifts and Ghosts
By Kate Wright I’m seven years old dancing to Buddy Holly on a red rug. The warm crackle of the stylus on the vinyl rhymes with the burning wood hissing on the open fire. Carbon, once captured and condensed into living forests, is rapidly escaping its cellulose confines.
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Between Here and There
By Anna Pilz I have never set foot on the continent called Australia. I am unfamiliar with its beaches, bushlands, deserts, and cityscapes, with their sounds and smells, colours and textures. It is a place far away that I encountered mostly in my studies on nineteenth-century Ireland. I have travelled there in my imagination alongside…
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Smoke, Black Cockatoos, and Banksias
By Jessica White In November 2019, before I flew to Munich, I stayed with my parents in Armidale, New South Wales. National parks, farms, and properties between the town and the coast were on fire and, depending on the wind, the grey-brown miasma of smoke blocked out the blue sky. The town was on level…
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Watch and Act, Summer
By Susan Ballard At first, there are only a couple of photos. The usual places: the Guardian, Instagram, Facebook. I trace the fire as it creeps down and across the Southern Highlands, through the deep gullies of the Blue Mountains, and suddenly flares across the South Coast. I keep half an eye on the glistening…
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Matter of Degrees
*Featured image: Australian bushfires from space, 2019 (CC BY SA 3.0) By Anna Pilz and Kate Wright In early January 2020, we began discussing the possibility of curating a collection of creative and intellectual work about the bushfire crisis devastating unceded Aboriginal countries in the continent that is now commonly called “Australia”. Now, only three…
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Annotated Bibliography
By Jayne Regan The destructive scale of the 2019-2020 Australian fire season was reported around the world. This multilingual bibliography—collated with the help of RCC associates—offers a sample of online material relating to the fires, published within Australia and without.
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Mosquitopia? Could We or Should We Eradicate Mosquitos: A Short Film
In this short film created by the Mosquitopia team following the Rachel Carson Legacy Symposium “Mosquitopia? The Place of Pests in a Healthy World,” 21 experts give their opinions and insights on this critical question.
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Writing with Landscape—A Workshop with Laura Watts
By Martín Fonck, Saskia Brill & Noemi Quagliati “Stuff happens off camera, the pen only moves so fast, you can only sit in one chair, not all the chairs in all the room. This is good, honest objectivity because it has good, honest limits. The instruments for observation are here, not over there, and definitely…
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Book review: Fire: A Brief History (Second Edition) by Stephen J. Pyne
This book review was written by Annika Spenger, one of the students in the Environmental Studies Certificate Program at the Rachel Carson Center. By Annika Spenger “We are truly a species touched by fire” (p. 24)—Stephen J. Pyne’s book Fire: A Brief History focuses on exactly this relationship of mankind, fire, and nature. Published as…