Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
-
Fixing a Nation’s Plumbing II: What We Choose to Ignore
by Vikas Lakhani This is the second post about India’s National River Linking Project. Read the first part here. As has been clear in the previous post, I see several fundamental objections to the NRLP. First and foremost, environmentalists have rightly raised serious concerns about the ecological consequences of this grand scheme. They argue that…
-
Fixing a Nation’s Plumbing I: India’s National River Linking Project
by Vikas Lakhani In 1946, British colonialists launched a grand scheme to cultivate groundnuts in the uninhabitable parts of Tanganyika, a former colony that corresponds to the mainland part of today’s United Republic of Tanzania. Under the leadership of the agronomist John Wakefield, the scheme—named the “Wakefield missionâ€â€”was driven by the desperation to overcome the…
-
Tales from Piplantri
“A Fable for Today…†By Vidya Sarveswaran We are just beginning to hear the murmurs of a nervous street. The sky above is like handmade parchment. Powder blue with swirls of crimped clouds. The air is heavy with the cloying smell of equally heavy flowers that attract snakes. But they do not worry about snakes…
-
LUNCHTIME COLLOQUIA, SUMMER 2016
Socialist industrialization, eco-linguistic, agro-food globalization and much more during the 2016 summer semester at the Rachel Carson Center. Would you like to keep up to date with our latest Lunchtime Colloquia? Then follow us by subscribing to our Rachel Carson Center Youtube Channel for new (and old) discussions! 14 April 2016: Ernst Langthaler on “‘Miracle Bean’: Soy…
-
Making Tracks: Sarah Strauss
In the “Making Tracks†series, RCC fellows and alumni present their experiences in environmental humanities, retracing the paths that led them to the Rachel Carson Center. For more information, please click here. “Hither and Yon—All roads lead to Munich?†by Sarah Strauss It’s really all about the stories. I started my academic career thinking I…
-
Making Tracks: Salma Monani
In the “Making Tracks†series, RCC fellows and alumni present their experiences in environmental humanities, retracing the paths that led them to the Rachel Carson Center. For more information, please click here. “70mm is Big!†Rethinking Cinema, Otherness, and Ecological Relations by Salma Monani Going to the movies during my childhood in the mid-1970s and…
-
Lunchtime Colloquia, Summer 2015
Watch fantastic presentations from the summer semester.Â
-
Outsmarting Technology: Elephants as Non-Human-Actors in Wildlife Conflicts
By Ursula Münster What differentiates humans from other animals is a question that has long occupied scholars in the life sciences and humanities alike. For the conservation biologists, farmers, and indigenous Adivasis I met during my ethnographic fieldwork at a wildlife sanctuary in South India, it is precisely the resemblance of certain animal species to…