Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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Worldview: Legal Implications of Environmental Risks
In this special feature, Professor Harald Koch discusses the legal implications of environmental disasters.
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Worldview: Earthquakes in Munich?
By Katrin Kleemann If you followed the news over the weekend, you will have seen that several serious earthquakes occurred over the past few days. The Kumamoto Prefecture on the island of Kyushu in Japan was hit by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake on Saturday morning (local time). On Thursday the region had already suffered a…
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Worldview: Taking Care of the “Yaguareté†in the Littoral Region of Argentina
by MarÃa Valeria Berros When you walk around the Littoral region, northeast Argentina, you seldom hear the word “jaguar.†Here and across Argentina the Guaranà expression “yaguareté,†meaning “the real beast,†is more common. The presence of the yaguareté in many famous stories, songs, and legends highlights its importance in Argentine culture and history. The biggest…
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Worldview: Antarctica
by Ingo Heidbrink Antarctica is the only continent with a permanent population of zero, and it has a strong international regulation system governing human activities from research to tourism. One might question whether an environmental history of Antarctica, beyond natural history, could therefore even be possible. While I am no native or citizen of Antarctica—these…
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Worldview: Learning to Love (or Hate?) Pesticides in the USA
by Michelle Mart As scholars, we spend time revisiting the turning points of history, seeking to understand what made particular periods or figures so significant. Thus, I looked back to Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, trying to understand why the author and her book were usually credited with the birth of environmentalism and a new…
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Worldview: Environmental Conflicts and Interdisciplinarity in Argentina
by MarÃa Valeria Berros Environmental issues are highly debated in today’s Argentina, and are researched across a range of disciplines—political science, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, literature, and law—as problems linking nature protection, development, and poverty. Analysis has begun to focus on disciplines where the ecological question is fundamentally relevant, such as public debate, risk, and social…
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Worldview: Transient Lifestyle, Everlasting Environmental Impacts: Reflections from my Time in Munich
by Laurianne Posch Standing in my grandparents’ kitchen at a family gathering on a sunny winter’s day in Iowa I overheard my uncle ask my cousin, who was around my age, the seemingly simple question: “So where are you living right now?†I cringed, grateful that I wouldn’t be the one to have to muster…
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Worldview: No Such Thing as the End of History: Good News from the Amazon
This week, we bring you a new Perspectives volume in Portuguese and exciting developments from the Amazon rainforest. The RCC Perspectives 2013/7 volume entitled New Environmental Histories of Latin America and the Caribbean has just been published in Portuguese, translated by former RCC intern Filipa Soares. It includes short histories both of individual countries and…
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Worldview: China’s Colorful Future
Post by Fei Sheng “Yellow†has a unique meaning in the Chinese conception of environment and society. We have always believed that our civilization—which, despite small interruptions, has never been significantly disrupted during the last 4,000 or even 5,000 years—is derived from the soil of our mother land, the Yellow Highland (Loess Plateau), and from…