Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
-
Food for an Abundant Future
By Pollyanna Rhee: “The future of farming. The future of food.” The website for Kernza® displays little modesty about its ambitions. It’s not a surprise that the producer of a good meant for the consumer market would be hyperbolic in their promises, but others have found the claim enticing. “Could Superwheat Kernza Save Our Soil?”…
-
The Planetary as Embodied
By Misria Shaik Ali: Planetary health encompasses the interrelated health of human beings and natural systems. Planetary conceptualities, including that of planetary health, are presumed to require interventions at the scale of global systems as “the global” is frequently taken to proportionately represent the concomitant vastness of “the planetary.” In contrast, traces of planetary harm…
-
On the Scenic Beauty of Santiago: What Does the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Know About Aesthetics?
By Floris Winckel and Alice Murphy: An Ecosystem Services article from 2017 warned that under current trends in urbanization, rising temperatures, and wildfires, Santiago de Chile could suffer an alarming 18 to 28 percent drop in scenic beauty. This statistic may surprise readers. Some may find it odd, even inappropriate, to focus on aesthetics in…
-
On Moral Grounds? Carbon Futures for Lowland Peat
By Aneurin Merrill-Glover: Across Europe, peatlands have nurtured sophisticated and distinctive socio-ecological systems for thousands of years. The process of restoring these unique landscapes—or “peatscapes”—is one that is neither strictly ecological nor exclusively ordered as part of a top-down international response to global warming. On the contrary, peatland restoration as a form of climate-change mitigation…
-
Russian Environmental Politics: Reading Between the Lines—New Climate, New Strategy: Betting on the Revival of Mammoths over the End of Fossil Fuels
By Vita Lacis: On 26 October 2023, Vladimir Putin signed a revised version of the Climate Doctrine of the Russian Federation—a high-profile document that determines the climate policies of the state on all levels, from international to municipal. Although only an updated version of the previous climate doctrine, released in 2009, the Doctrine illuminates the…
-
Russian Environmental Politics: Reading Between the Lines—The Wounds of War, and What We Must Know
By Vita Lacis: On the morning of 24 February 2022, I woke up to pictures and videos of Russian tanks rolling into Ukrainian cities and Russian planes dropping bombs on Ukrainian residential areas, which look so painfully familiar to anyone who spent most of their life in an identical khrushchevka somewhere in the Murmansk region, Khabarovsk, or…
-
Resisting Climate Change Apocalypticism: Environmental Justice Activism from the South Pacific
By Hanna Straß-Senol In late 2013, an Australian newspaper reported that a man from Kiribati “stood to make history as the world’s first climate refugee.” The New Zealand High Court, before which the man appeared, rejected the claim because the category of climate refugee was not included under the United Nation’s provisions for refugees.
-
We Are All Antarcticans
By Fern Hames As a teenager in the 1970s, I was shocked by the environmental destruction described by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring and entranced by the idea of living in the forest and studying animals, as demonstrated by Jane Goodall in Gombe National Park, Tanzania. These two highly influential women influenced me to study…
-
The Future of Amazonia: Inheritance or Ruin?
By Marcílio de Freitas Amazonia is one of the planet’s last utopias. Even before the New World was “discovered,” it existed in the imaginary of foreign travelers and governments. Yet the future of Brazil’s Amazonia region is fast becoming a tragedy in the making, which is calling out for international attention.