Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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Gifts and Ghosts
By Kate Wright I’m seven years old dancing to Buddy Holly on a red rug. The warm crackle of the stylus on the vinyl rhymes with the burning wood hissing on the open fire. Carbon, once captured and condensed into living forests, is rapidly escaping its cellulose confines.
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Between Here and There
By Anna Pilz I have never set foot on the continent called Australia. I am unfamiliar with its beaches, bushlands, deserts, and cityscapes, with their sounds and smells, colours and textures. It is a place far away that I encountered mostly in my studies on nineteenth-century Ireland. I have travelled there in my imagination alongside…
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Smoke, Black Cockatoos, and Banksias
By Jessica White In November 2019, before I flew to Munich, I stayed with my parents in Armidale, New South Wales. National parks, farms, and properties between the town and the coast were on fire and, depending on the wind, the grey-brown miasma of smoke blocked out the blue sky. The town was on level…
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Matter of Degrees
*Featured image: Australian bushfires from space, 2019 (CC BY SA 3.0) By Anna Pilz and Kate Wright In early January 2020, we began discussing the possibility of curating a collection of creative and intellectual work about the bushfire crisis devastating unceded Aboriginal countries in the continent that is now commonly called “Australia”. Now, only three…
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Post-Mosquito Mortem: A Symposium Report
A report of the event “Mosquitopia? The Place of Pests in a Healthy World” (A Rachel Carson Legacy Symposium). For more on the topic, check out the three-part feature “Mosquitopia” in the ongoing series “Silent Spring Continued: A World without Insects.” 24–27 October 2019, Landshut (Munich) By Marcus Hall At the end of three days…
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Bookshelf: The Breakthrough of Environmental History
Review of Stormflod by Bo Poulsen (Aarhus University Press, 2019) By Katie Ritson This book is volume 24 in the high profile series “100 Histories of Denmark” published by Aarhus University Press, which over eight years will see a range of historians present the hundred most important historical events and topics from Danish history. The…
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Mosquitopia Part 3: Key Reasons for Killing Mosquitoes
By Marcus Hall and Dan Tamir Human health: First and foremost, despite the many and important reasons for saving mosquitoes, or at least saving certain mosquitoes in certain situations, there remains a dire need to eradicate these creatures—even when it means undertaking extreme measures to accomplish this goal.
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Mosquitopia Part 2: A few Reasons for Saving Mosquitoes
By Marcus Hall and Dan Tamir We must remind ourselves that we are ultimately battling disease, not mosquitoes, and that there may be more effective, more economical, more ethical ways to do this than mosquito control. Malaria once emanated from swamps and bad air, though with more evidence it became clear that mosquitoes were the…
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Mosquitopia Part 1: Killing Mosquitoes? The Pros and Cons
By Marcus Hall and Dan Tamir Global warming is ushering us into a new mosquito epoch. Ready or not, mosquitoes are coming faster than before; both indigenous and non, disease-carrying and not, human-biting and not. What are we to do with these buzzing creatures, and what has already been done with them?