Welcome to “Making Tracks,” one of the longest running series on Seeing the Woods. This project developed around the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) Conference 2013.
The Rachel Carson Center invited all former and current fellows to attend the conference. In return, the fellows provided short essays explaining how they had come to work on environmental humanities issues.
We were delighted with the results. Scholars from different countries, cultures, and backgrounds described their upbringings, studies, and careers, as well as the chance encounters and twists of fate that led them to environmental studies and to the Rachel Carson Center.
Their essays demonstrate the diversity of the Rachel Carson Center and offer more general reflections on environmental scholarship. Some of the pieces were published in a volume of our RCC Perspectives journal entitled “Making Tracks: Human and Environmental Histories.” Due to limited space, we were not able to include all of the essays. We therefore decided to post both the essays from the journal volume and the unpublished essays on our blog, as an ongoing record of journeys leading to the Rachel Carson Center.
Full of humor and insight, these posts provide a unique glimpse into the development of environmental awareness, the development of environmental studies, and the ways in which our connections to people and places shape our lives. We hope you enjoy them!
To read the full series, scroll through the blog here. The most recent posts are provided below.
By: Dominic Hinde From around the age of 15, I think I had wanted to be a journalist, and in the pre-Amazon time before print publishing’s great data-driven reckoning I would go to the branch of the British book chain Waterstones in my local town and buy autobiographies and memoirs by foreign and war correspondents.…
By Marcela López Since I was a child, I have had the opportunity to travel around Colombia with my family and friends and explore a wide variety of ecosystems ranging from tropical rainforests to deserts, savannas, and páramos. By traveling through these remote landscapes, I became fascinated not only by nature’s “pristine” character, but also…
By Claiton Marcio da Silva *All images courtesy of the author, taken 2013 (unless otherwise specified). Featured image: Road to the Espírito Santo belvedere, Jalapão State Park, Tocantins The Brazilian Cerrado made me an environmental historian. My interest in the agricultural transformations in Brazilian savannas—a biome located in the central part of Brazil that extends…
In the “Making Tracks” series, RCC fellows and alumni present their experiences in environmental humanities, retracing the paths that led them to the Rachel Carson Center. For more information, please click here. By Tony Weis *All images courtesy of the author I come from the settler-colonial nation of Canada, in a part of southwestern Ontario that…
By Jennifer Carlson My journey to the Rachel Carson Center began in the 1980s on Texas’s blackland prairie, where my family spent weekends on an old farm that my father’s parents owned east of Austin. While my father, mother, and grandfather cared for our cows, fixed fences, or bought supplies in town, my grandmother swept…
By Birgit Schneider I have been interested in representations with a focus on visuality for a very long time. In fact, it wasn’t my early childhood experiences with the outdoors that led to my interest in environmental issues in the first place, but rather my mediated experiences with nature. Like most others, I frequently encounter…
By Lynda Walsh I’m not 100 percent positive, but I believe I may be the first rhetorician who has been a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center. This impression was corroborated by the confused squints that frequently greeted me when I introduced myself in the corridors or at a Works-in-Progress meeting: “Rhetoric?” my new colleagues…
By Charlie Trautmann Have you ever received a paperback for Christmas from your mother-in-law that landed you a fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich? I have. My journey to the Carson Center was more like an odyssey—long and circuitous.
By Chris Cokinos Intention is a funny thing, especially when it comes to creative work. Intention can become something forced; it can become an attachment to outcome at the expense of actually giving into the work itself. There’s a phrase from Taoist philosophy—wu wei. Wu wei means working without effort. Flow.
By Teresia Spezio As a child, I had first-hand experience with air and water pollution. I grew up in the city of Pittsburgh, which was once the steel making capital of the United States. I remember trips on the Parkway East with my family driving past the Jones & Laughlin primary steel mill where men…
In the “Making Tracks” series, RCC fellows and alumni present their experiences in environmental humanities, retracing the paths that led them to the Rachel Carson Center. For more information, please click here. By Gregg Mitman My journey to the Rachel Carson Center began in 1967 in the backseat of a blue Dodge sedan, packed with my…
In the “Making Tracks” series, RCC fellows and alumni present their experiences in environmental humanities, retracing the paths that led them to the Rachel Carson Center. For more information, please click here. By Lisa FitzGerald Environments needle their way into our minds, becoming the settings for our stories but also telling their own tales. Landscapes push…
In the “Making Tracks” series, RCC fellows and alumni present their experiences in environmental humanities, retracing the paths that led them to the Rachel Carson Center. For more information, please click here. By Mu Cao. When I was little, I spent a lot of time sitting in our small yard listening to funny local stories…
In the “Making Tracks” series, RCC fellows and alumni present their experiences in environmental humanities, retracing the paths that led them to the Rachel Carson Center. For more information, please click here. “Meditations of a Sputnik” by Tom Griffiths I am a “Sputnik,” born in the year the Soviet satellite launched the Cold War into…
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