Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
-
The King of Fruits Needs Space
By Judith Bopp: On a particularly hot and dry morning in early May, my friend—a local farmer—and I loaded a canoe into the car and made our way to the Huai Raeng Reservoir in Thailand’s Trat Province, not far from the Cambodian border. Parked along the shore when we arrived were several pickup trucks with…
-
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.
-
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…
-
Insect Portrait: Ladybird Beetles
*Image: ©Alexandra Magro Ladybird beetles (of the family Coccinellidae) are a fascinating group of insects. Thriving in all kinds of habitats, they are extremely diverse; around 6,000 species have been described worldwide. Although they are often recognized as beneficial predatory insectivores, their food preferences are in fact very large: some species are fungus feeders, and…
-
Ecopolis Munich: Environmental Stories of Discovery
The student exhibition “Ecopolis Munich: Environmental Stories of Discovery” sheds light on the relationship between Munich’s residents and their urban environment. The exhibition was on display from 12 to 20 October 2019 at the whiteBOX in the Werksviertel Mitte. The practical seminar leading to the production of the exhibition also received LMU’s prize for innovative…
-
Insects as Inspiration
By Jan Goedbloed My name is Jan, I am now 67 years old. I studied biology between 1969 and 1976, and then could not find a job. I helped start a bird hospital, and then worked as an educational assistant in a natural history museum where I tried to incorporate nature meditation.
-
Snapshot: Ecocritics Welcome Here!
On 15 February, the RCC played host to a poster exhibition on ecocriticism. Master’s-level students working with Dr Felicitas Meifert-Menhard from LMU Munich’s English department had spent a semester learning about the wide reach and application of reading literary texts ecologically—not just contemporary texts concerned with anthropogenic climate change, but also much older texts that…
-
Making Tracks: Birgit Schneider
By Birgit Schneider I have been interested in representations with a focus on visuality for a very long time. In fact, it wasn’t my early childhood experiences with the outdoors that led to my interest in environmental issues in the first place, but rather my mediated experiences with nature. Like most others, I frequently encounter…
-
Where Have All the Insects Gone?
For many of us, engaging with insects doesn’t extend much beyond swatting away flies and mosquitoes, or calling on bigger and braver friends to deposit unwanted “visitors” outside. And yet, as E.O. Wilson observed, it is we who are the visitors in “a primarily invertebrate world.”