Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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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?”…
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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…
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Hiking Through a Future Sacrifice Zone? A Story of Environmental Justice and Green Growth in the Tyrolean Alps
By Lukas Kunerth & Carolin Funcke: The Tyrolean Platzertal exudes a sense of remoteness like hardly any other valley in the Austrian Alps. Wafts of mist softly envelope the mountain tops as we, two academic researchers who made the trip here from Munich, begin our ascent. A light drizzle dampens the green landscape, which provides a…
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Studying Scientists in Their Natural Habitat
By Melissa Haeffner: Growing up in a small suburb in the United States, my dream was to move to the big city, to agilely navigate through shoulder-to-shoulder masses of humanity and revel in the clashes between cultures. I didn’t pay attention to the “environment” or “nature,” and it was not a central part of my…
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Tracing Landscape Change through Dung Beetles
By Olea Morris: In some ways, the dung beetles and I had a lot in common! Working as a volunteer on a farm in the highlands of Veracruz, Mexico, I was assigned the very unglamorous but important role of tending to the manure of the animals raised there.
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Insect Portrait: The Dung Beetle
By Olea Morris The family of insects known as “dung beetle,” or escarabajos del estiercol, is a diverse one—even amongst those that make the same misty cloud forests of Mexico their home. Some, like Onthophagus corrosus, are jet black and no bigger than the fingernail of a pinky finger, while others, like Phanaeus endymion, have…
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The Strong Who Inspire: A Poem in Memory of Rachel Carson
This short guest post by award-winning nature writer Ellery Akers commemorates one of the worlds greatest conservationists and our intitute’s namesake, Rachel Carson. Carson died on 14 April 1964 at the age of 56. The poem, taken from Ellery’s new book Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance, has been reprodced here with her kind permission. By…
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Mosquitopia? Could We or Should We Eradicate Mosquitos: A Short Film
In this short film created by the Mosquitopia team following the Rachel Carson Legacy Symposium “Mosquitopia? The Place of Pests in a Healthy World,” 21 experts give their opinions and insights on this critical question.
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The Ottoman Imperial Brewery and its Legacy: Multiculturalism, Hedonism, Conservationism
By Malte Fuhrmann Turkey is home to some of the most impressive ancient and medieval archaeological remains of the Mediterranean, but its government does not have a good reputation for its conservation policy.