Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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Cities Under Water: Valencia, Spain, and Urban Flooding
By Paul Josephson: On 29 October 2024, residents of the town of Paiporta (pop. 27,000), about eight kilometers from Valencia’s city center, saw a “tsunami†of mud and debris catapulting down toward them. At least 60 people died in Paiporta, and a total of 222 individuals died in the region. The area is prone to…
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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…
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Mumbai Deluge 2017: Nowadays Rain Gods Have a New Tool—Plastic Bags!
by Ayushi Dhawan We often do not think twice before buying a plastic bag at a supermarket or a shopping mall. It’s bought because it’s needed and discarded after being used for a short while. How harmful can these everyday practices be to our environment? Mumbai’s recent floods definitely have a story to tell in…
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Toxic Floods: Let’s Talk about the Weather
By Simone M. Müller We’ve probably all been thinking about the weather lately. Our officemates are sneezing, others are coughing, the first one is turning in a sick note. It’s the time of year when weather-related topics start dominating our everyday conversation: the change of the season, the turning of the leaves from deep green…
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Day 4. Danube Excursion: Linz—Krems
by Stefan Bitsch Linz → Hütting → Grein → Melk → Krems Dangers of the Danube: Floods and Rapids throughout History On the fourth day of our excursion, the group had the opportunity to learn from Christian Rohr (University of Bern) and Severin Hohensinner (University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna), who…
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Interview: Lise Sedrez on the Samarco Tailings Dam Spill, Minas Gerais, Brazil (Part One)
The mine tailing dam break in Bento Rodrigues, Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil, on 5 November 2015 has been described by the Brazilian government as the country’s worst environmental catastrophe. Robert Emmett and Claire Lagier sat down with Brazilian environmental historian Lise Sedrez at the RCC in Munich on 19 November and recorded the following interview. RE:…