Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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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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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…
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Bookshelf: The Breakthrough of Environmental History
Review of Stormflod by Bo Poulsen (Aarhus University Press, 2019) By Katie Ritson This book is volume 24 in the high profile series “100 Histories of Denmark€ published by Aarhus University Press, which over eight years will see a range of historians present the hundred most important historical events and topics from Danish history. The…
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Book Review: Quest for the Unity of Knowledge, by David Lowenthal
by Eugenio Luciano “Two modes of understanding dominate the history of ideas. One posits the overarching unity of knowledge, the other cherishes its multifarious diversity. Unity is the goal of those who seek a single all-encompassing explanation of everything. Diversity is lauded by those who commend difference and variety as life-enhancing€ (p. 1). This is…
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Q&A with Jessica J. Lee
For this Bookshelf post, we asked author and RCC alumna Jessica J. Lee a few questions about her work and her 2017 book, Turning: A Swimming Memoir. What is the subject of your book and how did it come about? Turning is a hybrid work of nature writing and memoir, following a year I spent…
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Review of “Disrupted Landscapes: State, Peasants and the Politics of Land in Postsocialist Romania” by Stefan Dorondel
by Marco Armiero Marco Armiero is director of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. This post originally appeared on Entitle Blog – A Collaborative Writing Project on Political Ecology and is reposted with kind permission of the author. How many times have we repeated to each other that there is…
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Bookshelf Special Feature Part 2: National Park Science
A Review of National Park Science: Jane Carruthers’ Magnum Opus by Bernhard Gißibl * Part 1 features Jane Carruthers’ introduction to her book and a comment by Libby Robin. A full review of National Park Science by Bernhard Gißibl will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Environment and History. Jane Carruthers’ National Park Science is the first comprehensive…
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Paradigm Shifts in Environmental Thinking: Autonomous Nature by Carolyn Merchant
by Yan Gao Carolyn Merchant’s book Autonomous Nature traces paradigmatic shifts in environmental thinking from a long-term perspective. Derived from her ever-enduring interest in and perpetual investigations of chaos and complexity theories, Merchant probes into the roots and evolution of the terms natura naturans (“Nature naturing,€ or nature creating, evolving, and changing) and natura naturata…