Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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Fixing a Nation’s Plumbing I: India’s National River Linking Project
by Vikas Lakhani In 1946, British colonialists launched a grand scheme to cultivate groundnuts in the uninhabitable parts of Tanganyika, a former colony that corresponds to the mainland part of today’s United Republic of Tanzania. Under the leadership of the agronomist John Wakefield, the scheme—named the “Wakefield mission€—was driven by the desperation to overcome the…
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The Lager Beer Revolution in the United States
By Jana Weiß In November 2015, a record that had lasted 142 years was broken: for the first time since 1873, the peak number of breweries passed 4,131. Since then, the number of US breweries has continued to reach new heights.
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The Last Kindred Spirit of Moths and Butterflies
By Susanne Schmitt and Birgit Müller We are standing in a hallway across from a hidden treasure: the world’s largest collection of butterflies and moths, holding about 13 million specimens. Some parts of the collection date back to the 1760s; some historic sections have been carefully gathered and annotated by the likes of explorer and…
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Insect Profile: The Apollo
*Featured image: Specimens of Parnassius Apollo in a collection case at the Zoologische Staatssammlung München. Photo: Susanne Schmitt. By Susanne Schmitt and Birgit Müller Classified as moderately endangered, Parnassius apollo is a species of butterfly that inhabits mountain meadows and rocky alpine sites. These creatures’ large wings make them visible from afar, even for visually clumsy…
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Making Tracks: Jenny Carlson
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…
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Fifty Years Ago, Cockchafers Belonged to Spring…
By Birgit Müller and Susanne Schmitt We met Ernst-Gerhard Burmeister at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology where he has dedicated most of his professional life to the amazing collection of over 25 million zoological specimens, one of the largest natural history collections in the world.
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Insect Profile: The Cockchafer
“The Cockchafer, Part 1€ By Birgit Müller and Susanne Schmitt On a warm night in May, the cockchafer crawls out of the earth for the first time to take flight into the bushes and trees. It has been living below ground for four years since it first hatched: a pale, fat, maggot-like grub that will…
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Making Tracks: Birgit Schneider
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…
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The Birth and Quick Death of Canada’s First Commercial Brewery, 1671–1675
By Matthew Bellamy Few nations are more blessed by nature than Canada when it comes to brewing beer. The vast northern territory has ideal climatic conditions to produce all of the natural ingredients—barley, hops, and fresh water—to manufacture a perfect pint.