Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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Where Have All the Insects Gone?
For many of us, engaging with insects doesn’t extend much beyond swatting away flies and mosquitoes, or calling on bigger and braver friends to deposit unwanted “visitors€ outside. And yet, as E.O. Wilson observed, it is we who are the visitors in “a primarily invertebrate world.€
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Making Tracks: Lynda Walsh
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…
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Gaza’s Happy Hour? When Late Ottoman Palestine Met the Victorian Drinking Culture
By Dotan Halevy If we could travel back in time to the town of Gaza in March 1886, we would probably be joining a large crowd gathered on the beach to catch a glimpse of the Troqueer, a grain-carrying steamship—a behemoth of thirteen hundred tons—lying on its side about a mile offshore.
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Call for Submissions: Silent Spring Continued
By Birgit Müller, Sainath Suryanarayanan, Katarzyna Beilin, Susanne Schmitt, Tony Weis, and Serenella Iovino The recent article by Hallmann and others about a more than 75 percent decline in the biomass of flying insects in Germany over the past 27 years has received considerable media attention and sparked discussion among a number of fellows at the…
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Making Tracks: Charlie Trautmann
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.
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German Beer and the Making of a New China
By Shen Hou The first commercial filmed in China was a 1947 effort to sell Tsingtao Beer, one of the world’s most famous brands. “Tsingtao€ is an older spelling of the name “Qingdao,€ the city that is still home to the beer company.
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Making Tracks: Chris Cokinos
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.
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Path Dependency: Layers of History along the Mill Creek
Guest Post by Kathleen Smythe Kathleen Smythe is a professor in the Department of History at Xavier University, Cincinnati. In this post, she offers a fascinating glimpse into the history of Mill Creek, engaging with the historical, social, economic, and ecological meanings behind the idea of a watershed. This forms the basis of her course…
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From Herders to Hikers, the Shifting Lives of Scottish Bothies
This piece was originally published by Edge Effects and is reposted here with kind permission. All photographs are courtesy of the author. By Jonas Stuck When I was 20 years old, I heard about huts in northern England and Scotland called bothies. I didn’t even know how to pronounce the name, let alone how to find…