Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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The Distant Spring: Philosophy and Social Innovation
By Rafael Ziegler In response to the harm done to birds by the widespread use of pesticides, Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring (1962). Her account of the “silencing of the birds€ helped motivate a flock of social innovation via the emerging environmental movement. Spring 2020 has arrived with a virus pushing us behind windows and…
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Lessons from the Coronavirus Pandemic for Environmental Governance
By Erin Ryan The coronavirus pandemic offers lessons for leaders on every level about how—and how not—to manage complex interjurisdictional challenges, like the environment, which unfold without regard for political boundaries [1].
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Fault Lines: On the Ground in Colombia
By Paula Ungar I spend the quarantine days in my old, quiet apartment. From the window, I can see the shape of the Andean mountains that embrace the Eastern part of Bogotá. Groups of little houses are embroidered into that mountainside, like honeycombs, forming one of the numerous self-built quarters in this city inhabited by…
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Corona Crisis, UNESCO and the Future: Do We Need a New World Heritage?
By Cornelius Holtdorf and Annalisa Bolin A virus has put the world on hold. Many individual human actions suddenly appear extremely small and insignificant in comparison with the unyielding might and relentless spread with which the SARS-CoV-2 virus is presently conquering Earth. We are witnessing how the virus does not distinguish between human hosts and…
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Cross-Species Conversations and the Coronavirus
By Serenella Iovino (translated by Elena Past) Zoonosis. This is one of the strange words that the onset of the coronavirus has forced us to learn. Zoonosis is a transitive infection, a virus that passes from animals to human beings. Or rather: it passes to our species from other animal species, recalling that human and…
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“You have to change your life!€ Our Common Post-Corona Future through a Swedish Lens
By Sigurd Bergmann Once the coronavirus pandemic is over, we will wake up to a new society. Before everything gets better, however, everything will get worse—for a long time yet. We are faced with frightening images and stories of suffering in refugee camps, ill-equipped hospitals in poor countries, and the suffering of so many people…
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Is Covid-19 a “Capitalocene€ Challenge?
By Jenia Mukherjee and Amrita Sen Rapid shifts across nine planetary boundaries, including deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and climate change, have occurred as a result of the Anthropocene. As recent advances in research suggest, political, economic, and technocratic interests drive global development enterprises. “Capitalocene,€ a word used frequently now, emphasizes the palpable connections between planetary…
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Breath
By Kelly Donati In early January 2020, hitting the refresh button on The Guardian punctuated my waking hours as I obsessively tracked the movement of the bushfires from Munich. Watching from afar, sleep grew elusive. Just as I was meant to be drifting off, people along the east coast of Australia were waking up—if they…
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Canberra Dispatches
By Cameron Muir The smoke has been here hanging all day or blowing in of an evening for weeks now. The kids have been indoors most of this time. Even for the last two weeks of school, before the summer holidays, they were ordered to stay inside and spent their lunches and recesses in the…