Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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2020 Visions for Environmental History: Well-Grounded
This is the second post in a series on “2020 Visions for Environmental History€ being published jointly by NiCHE’s blog The Otter ~ La loutre and Rachel Carson Center’s blog Seeing the Woods, with posts by Lisa Mighetto, Alan MacEachern, Arielle Helmick, and Claudia Leal. The series is intended to promote discussion at a session of the same name at the World Congress…
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Changing Landscapes of Indigeneity: CHE Place-Based Workshop
Workshop Report (13–16 May 2019, Madison–Wisconsin, USA) Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Center for Culture, History, and Environment By Daniel Dumas In May 2019, a group of staff, doctoral candidates, and Environmental Studies Certificate Program students from the Rachel Carson Center traveled to Wisconsin in order to take part in a place-based…
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Picking Hops in Nineteenth-Century Wisconsin
By Jennifer Jordan From 1873 to 1879, in Dellona, Wisconsin, Ella Seymour kept a sporadic record of her life. Her careful handwriting curled across the blue and red lines of the little ledger she used as a diary. She recounted the weather, illness, chores, and visits like so many of her fellow diarists of the…
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Writing for Change: Can Storytelling Save the Planet?
by Theresa Leisgang (@besal) Greta has not spent a single Friday in school since the beginning of the year. Little was the Swedish girl to know that one day over a million children in 1,700 places around the world were going to join her, demanding a radical change in climate politics. How did this happen?…
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The History of Munich’s Waste Management
This post by Christian Schnurr, a student of the RCC-LMU Environmental Studies Certificate Program, stems from his research conducted as part of the exhibition project “Ecopolis: Understanding and Imagining Munich’s Environments.€ Unless otherwise indicated, images are courtesy of AWM. Source: AWM Festschrift. An opera about rubbish disposal? Die Stadt, composed by Nélida Béjar and directed by Björn…
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Environmental Pasts—Environmental Futures: Perspectives on China
Conference Report (22–24 November 2018, Peking University, Beijing, China) By Elena Feditchkina Tracy (*Featured image: from left: Christof Mauch, Elena Feditchkina Tracy, Maohong Bao, Sophia Kalantzakos, and Fei Sheng) RCC fellows and alumni participated in the LMU-China Academic Network 4th Scientific Forum held on 22–24 November 2018, at Peking University in Beijing, China. Scholars joined their colleagues from Renmin…
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The Environmental History of the Pacific World
Conference report (24–26 May 2018, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China) by Shen HOU (all photos courtesy of the author) The Pacific Ocean is the outcome of plate tectonic movement and one of the largest eco-regions on earth. It was explored by ancient navigators, and people dispersed to all of the ocean’s shores during early waves…
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German Beer and the Making of a New China
By Shen Hou The first commercial filmed in China was a 1947 effort to sell Tsingtao Beer, one of the world’s most famous brands. “Tsingtao€ is an older spelling of the name “Qingdao,€ the city that is still home to the beer company.
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Path Dependency: Layers of History along the Mill Creek
Guest Post by Kathleen Smythe Kathleen Smythe is a professor in the Department of History at Xavier University, Cincinnati. In this post, she offers a fascinating glimpse into the history of Mill Creek, engaging with the historical, social, economic, and ecological meanings behind the idea of a watershed. This forms the basis of her course…