Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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Student Research: Gardeners
By Veronika Degmayr (Environmental Studies Certificate Program) Whether you’re an academic in the environmental field, an environmental activist, or just a person concerned about the state of our environment, you might at times wonder what good all that science, research, and activism is really doing. How far do published papers actually reach? Do we get to…
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Snapshot: Beach Litter in a Sustainable Exhibition
By Katrin Kleemann A few weeks ago, “Snapshot: Zero Waste?” featured an exhibition exploring global waste production. Today’s feature looks at what happens to that waste. As part of its Planet Oceans Initiative, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich hosts one of London’s first sustainable galleries: the “Environment Gallery.” It’s sustainable because all of the displays are made…
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Snapshot: Fur seals at the beach close to the former whaling station … on South Georgia.
For several decades at the beginning of the twentieth century the remote island of South Georgia, approximately 1,400 kilometers east of the southern tip of South America, was the center of the global whaling and sealing industries.
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Bookshelf: Jens Kersten on Inwastement—Abfall in Umwelt und Gesellschaft
The Inwastement volume arose from the research cluster “Waste and Society” of the RCC together with LMU’s Center for Advanced Studies. Published in German by Transcript, the issue includes contributions from: Soraya Heuss-Aßbichler, Claudia R. Binder, Eveline Dürr, Gisela Grupe, Rüdiger Haum, Michael Jedelhauser, Jens Kersten, Roman Köster, Reinhold Leinfelder, Christof Mauch, Wolfram Mauser, Karen Pittel, Gerhard Rettenberger,…
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Worldview: Taking Care of the “Yaguareté” in the Littoral Region of Argentina
by María Valeria Berros When you walk around the Littoral region, northeast Argentina, you seldom hear the word “jaguar.” Here and across Argentina the Guaraní 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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Photo of the Week: Tobias Schiefer
A Monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus, rests on a plant at the tropical butterfly house at Munich’s botanical gardens. Monarch butterflies have been the focus of many environmental campaigns on account of their dwindling numbers. Their demise has been linked to human activity, most recently in relation to the use of neonicotinoid pesticides.
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Gardening for Gardening’s Sake
Post by Jennifer Hamilton (This post is the latest in a series of reflections on Jeffrey Hou’s recent talk, “Urban Gardening as Insurgent Placemaking.” For the first piece in this series, please click here.) It “started with the park, but it has become bigger than the park” declared Turkish scholar and activist Nazan Ustundag on…
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Video: Donald Worster on “Facing Limits: Abundance, Scarcity, and the American Way of Life”
The Rachel Carson Center has produced a series of video interviews with fellows and associates regarding their work. Below is one video from this series. For the complete playlist (55 videos), click here.
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Photo of the Week – Grace Karskens
The Penrith Lakes Scheme area near Sydney, Australia, taken from Hawkesbury Lookout. The photo shows the surviving river flats and farms, the open cut gravel pits, the new lakes forming, the Nepean River on the right, and the foothills of the Lapstone Monocline (the Blue Mountains) in the foreground. (Please click the photo for a…