Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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Governmental Coercion Is Our Only Hope? A Commentary
Post by Rachel Shindelar If we are going to stop producing greenhouse gases and successfully mitigate climate change, we do not have time to wait around for individuals to become virtuous. Governmental coercion is our only hope. At least, this is what Oxford University professor John Broome claimed before launching into his lecture on “The…
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All Environmental Politics is Local: What Today’s Climate Activists Can Learn From Yesterday’s Antipollution Movement
Post by Christopher Sellers As we approach the forty-third Earth Day, American climate activism has finally gotten feisty. Hopes have arisen that its sway can approach that of the antipollution movement of the 1960s, out of which the first Earth Day sprang. A recent “Forward Climate” protest on February 17 drew an estimated 35–40,000 people…
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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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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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“Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw”: Jiang Rong’s “Wolf Totem”
Post by Brenda Black Jiang Rong’s autobiographical novel Wolf Totem was one of the group reads for the Global Environment Summer Academy held at the Rachel Carson Center last August. It recounts the experiences of a Chinese college student, Chen Zhen (the author’s alter ego), sent to live among the nomadic herders of Inner Mongolia…
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New Year, New Name, New Look, Same Mission!
Presenting the RCC’s blog, take two… We have a new look and a new name: Seeing the Woods! In our excitement about launching the RCC’s blog, we unfortunately overlooked an important step: making sure our desired name was not already taken. Alas, we have learned a lesson. A well-established political blog has been running under the…