Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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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…
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Russian Environmental Politics: Reading Between the Lines—Wartime Ecology: Guns Before Forests
By Vita Lacis: Russian governmental measures at the outset of their invasion of Ukraine loosened numerous environmental regulations to prop up Russian industry and business enterprises. Two years into the war the economy still seems to be going strong. But what are the costs to the environment?
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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…
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Opplevelser I Stavanger
(Adventures in Stavanger) In this mini series you can read about the experiences of Johanna Felber and Malin Klinski, candidates of the RCC’s Environmental Studies Certificate program, during an exchange program with the University of Stavanger in Norway. If you want to find out more about life in the land of the midnight sun, trolls, and vikings, you are in the right place… By…
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Teaching Environmental Humanities
Workshop Report, 22–23 November 2019, Rachel Carson Center, Munich How should we teach a discipline that is still evolving? This question brought together more than 20 practitioners and scholars from five continents, all involved in teaching within the broad field of environmental humanities (EH). Convened by Christof Mauch and Anna Antonova, the workshop created a…
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A Whale of a Time
*Featured image: Sperm whales under attack, from Thomas Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839). Photo: The New York Public Library via rawpixel, public domain. By: Daniel Dumas Zodiac crossings of rough seas, imperial expansion, and narratives of resistance and resilience. This is not the backdrop of an action flick coming to the…
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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…
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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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Overcoming the Fear Factor: Teaching and Learning about Insects and Biodiversity
By Tony Weis Insects have fascinated Nina Zitani for as long as she can remember. She vividly recalls making her first bug collection at age five, and searching for insects and other arthropods in her backyard and nearby forests in Moorestown, New Jersey, throughout her childhood.