Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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The Anglophone Dilemma in the Environmental Humanities
By Dan Finch-Race & Katie Ritson: Transnational discussions of the climate crisis generally use English as a primary language to facilitate direct communication among a high number of stakeholders. The primacy of English is clear for the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“version complète disponible en anglais seulement,€ the French list of…
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Why Ecocriticism Needs the Social Sciences (and Vice Versa)
By Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Alexa Weik von Mossner, W.P. Malecki, and Frank Hakemulder: Knowing that you need to tell a new story does not always mean that you know what to say, or how to say it. This is the situation we find ourselves in today.
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The Great Blasket Island, Storytelling, and the Environment
By Matthias Egeler & Anna Pilz: We are standing on the headland of Dunmore Head on the western edge of Dingle Peninsula, on the western edge of Ireland, on the western edge of Europe. One moment, the slope is speckled with light, the next it is in the shadow of a heavy rain cloud. Then…
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Reclaiming Oktoberfest: Celebrating Sustainability Instead of Consumerism
By Elmar Ujszaszi-Müller: Every year in late September, the atmosphere in Munich becomes thicker when Oktoberfest takes place. The intense odors of roasted almonds and grilled chicken mingle with those of specially brewed lager and the sweat of thousands of people roaming the festival grounds.
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A Sketch for Teaching the Anthropocene in the Alps
By Heidi E. Danzl (trans. Kristy Henderson) The Alps can be considered a hot spot for climate change due to changing growing seasons and tree lines, species migration, more intense weather events, increased glacial melt, droughts, mudslides, avalanches, flooding, and the omnipresence of micro-technofossils. They are therefore well suited to teaching the Anthropocene and exploring…
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Dazzling and Dangerous: Epidemics, Space Physics, and Settler Understandings of the Aurora Borealis
By Jennifer Fraser and Noah Stemeroff Earlier this year, Explore, a multimedia company that operates the largest live nature camera network on the planet, noticed that one of its livestreams was going viral. The feed in question broadcasts from Churchill, Manitoba. Positioned directly beneath the auroral oval, this camera offers viewers a chance to catch…
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Resisting Climate Change Apocalypticism: Environmental Justice Activism from the South Pacific
By Hanna Straß-Senol In late 2013, an Australian newspaper reported that a man from Kiribati “stood to make history as the world’s first climate refugee.€ The New Zealand High Court, before which the man appeared, rejected the claim because the category of climate refugee was not included under the United Nation’s provisions for refugees.
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Book Review: Elizabeth Hennessy, On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden
By Rodrigo Salido Moulinié The reports said they wanted to kill the turtle. They surrounded the research station and refused to let supplies go through to the 33 people—and the colony of reptiles—inside the building. Yet the fishermen went on strike and took the building not because they hated that turtle (they did not even…
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Starhawk, Henry Vaughan, and the Environmental Imagination
By Zane Johnson Times of widespread crisis often challenge conventional ways of being in and seeing the world. Sometimes these challenges take on a millenarian character, heralding the end of an epoch or the dawning of a new age.