Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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Fostering the Health of Humans and the Planet in a World of Many Worlds
Un Salto de Vida native species garden in El Salto, Mexico. Photo by Carlos E. Sánchez Pimienta. CC BY-NC 2.0 by Carlos E. Sánchez Pimienta Over the past two decades, there has been growing recognition among health professionals of the profound connection between human health and ecosystems. Historically, health was viewed as a condition of…
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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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Loss, Grief, and the Politics of Planetary Health
By Dylan M. Harris: Grief is inherently political. Death has a way of laying bare the unequal conditions of life, the very basis of politics. The vacuum of loss creates solidarity among those left to make sense of what has happened and what remains.1 Grief is necessarily relational, pulling together multiple lives and experiences, even…
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Who Is the Planetary Health Diet For?
By André Krebber and Nina Mackert: Food production is a central cause for global environmental degradation and change in ecosystems. In 2019 the EAT-Lancet Commission proposed a “Planetary Health Diet” that defined quantitative limits on food production to tackle this problem and advance both a healthy and ecologically sustainable food system. In this exploration, we…
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Careful Contemplations
By Tyanif Rico Rodríguez: An examination of contemplative care.
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Provocations of the Planetary: Ed Roberson’s Poetry of Scalar Disjunction
By Thomas Storey: The African American poet Ed Roberson’s (b. 1939) work engages with this incommensurability, this simultaneous continuity and discontinuity, by facing up to ways in which we are alienated from our planetary being. His poetry therefore offers a response to alterity, opacity, and the sublime realization of one’s place within a magnitude that…
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Nature and Me Make Two: The Genesis of Biophilia
By Dennis Liu: While the identities we don are deeply personal, their effects resonate in public, profoundly impacting our families and friends, our communities, and ultimately nations and societies. Two twentieth-century scholars, German-US social psychologist Erich Fromm (1900–1980) and US biologist E. O. Wilson (1930–2022), despite highly divergent backgrounds and training, converged on the importance…
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Plastic Trouble: A Graphic Novel, Part IV
Plastic Trouble is the story of Amiya, a young Himalayan brown bear exposed to plastic waste in the mountains she calls home. Come along on this four-part journey as Amiya wakes up from hibernation to face new, unexpected obstacles and meet new friends in the process.