Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
-
Environmental Pasts—Environmental Futures: Perspectives on China
Conference Report (22–24 November 2018, Peking University, Beijing, China) By Elena Feditchkina Tracy (*Featured image: from left: Christof Mauch, Elena Feditchkina Tracy, Maohong Bao, Sophia Kalantzakos, and Fei Sheng) RCC fellows and alumni participated in the LMU-China Academic Network 4th Scientific Forum held on 22–24 November 2018, at Peking University in Beijing, China. Scholars joined their colleagues from Renmin…
-
Knowing Nature: The Changing Foundations of Environmental Knowledge
Conference Report (Beijing, China, 25–27 May 2017) By Katrin Kleemann Historians like traditions and they like to invent them. Helmuth Trischler, director of the Rachel Carson Center and head of research at the Deutsches Museum, made this remark as he looked back at the conference’s five-year history. In May 2017, international scholars came together in China…
-
Snapshot: Do You Speak Envhist?
Should professional historians maintain their independence and objectivity as researchers, or should they address the social use of their field? Are there fundamental conflicts between the two? Do environmental or ecological historians need to become more useful and practical in addressing such global problems as climate change, intensified food production, and biodiversity loss? If so,…
-
Riches of Nature, Limits of Nature
“Riches of Nature, Limits of Nature: Donald Worster and Environmental History†Report on an International Conference (Beijing, China, June 26-28, 2016) In June of 2016, the Center for Ecological History (CEH) along with the School of History at Renmin University of China, hosted an academic conference honoring environmental history’s doyen Donald Worster (RCC alumnus). The…
-
Workshop: Transformations of the Earth
“Talking Transformation in Beijing†By Bailey Albrecht This piece was originally published in Edge Effects  on July 12, 2016 In Shanghai’s Natural History Museum there exists a full-sized re-creation of an African plain, complete with a herd of spooked zebras in perpetual flight from a crouching lion. It was neither the zebras, nor the two large…
-
CfP: Manufacturing Landscapes—Nature and Technology in Environmental History
28–31 May 2015, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China Co-sponsored by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich, and the Center for Ecological History, Renmin University of China Nuclear power plants, bullet trains, factory farms, and ancient rice paddies are all forms of landscapes transformed by technology. They express a relationship between…