Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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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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Exploring Health–Nutrition–Ecology Relationships and Resilience through Food-Farming Practices in Thailand
By Judith Bopp: The word Lebensmittel, one of several words for food in German, translates as “means to life” in English. This concept illustrates that supplying the body with nutritional and suitable foods is the key to maintaining vitality and overall well-being. Food–health linkages have already been recognized within scientific communities (cf. Schnitter and Berry…
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Hiking Through a Future Sacrifice Zone? A Story of Environmental Justice and Green Growth in the Tyrolean Alps
By Lukas Kunerth & Carolin Funcke: The Tyrolean Platzertal exudes a sense of remoteness like hardly any other valley in the Austrian Alps. Wafts of mist softly envelope the mountain tops as we, two academic researchers who made the trip here from Munich, begin our ascent. A light drizzle dampens the green landscape, which provides a…
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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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Flows, Histories, and Politics of Pollution in Europe (17–20 Century)
Conference Report Dates: 28–29August, 2020. Organizers: Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC) Conveners: Andrei Vinogradov (RCC) and Professor Julia Herzberg (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München). The online workshop started with welcome remarks by the conveners, who outlined the key methodological framework of the event. Pollution is one of the earliest topics in global environmental history, but…
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The Anthropocene: Challenging the Disciplines
Workshop Report (8 April 2019, Vienna, Austria) Vienna Anthropocene Network, University of Vienna By Eugenio Luciano On 8 April 2019, the University of Vienna hosted the workshop “The Anthropocene: Challenging the Disciplines” organized by the recently established Vienna Anthropocene Network. The 12th floor Sky Lounge of the university building at Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1 granted the participants…
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(Um)Weltschmerz: An Exercise in Humility and Melancholia
Conference Report (7–20 October 2018, Munich) Nearly three years to the day after the Marie Curie ENHANCE ITN’s official kick-off in Munich, a final conference titled (Um)Weltschmerz: An Exercise in Humility and Melancholia marked the official end of the program. After three years of intensive collaboration, the wide variety of academic disciplines and topics of…
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Placing Gender: Gender and Environmental History
By Katie Holmes and Ruth Morgan: Despite Carolyn Merchant’s provocative 1990 article on gender and environment in the Journal of American History, this multifaceted discipline remains an under-developed area of inquiry. For example, the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) conference in July 2017 hosted just one panel on gender and environmental history, while presentations…
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Migrations, Crossings, Unintended Destinations: Ecological Transfers across the Indian Ocean, 1850–1920
Conference Report (11–12 October 2018, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich, Germany) By Ulrike Kirchberger (*Featured Image: “If someday…” by Abhijit Kar Gupta, CC-BY 2.0 via flickr. ) In the age of empire, thousands of species of plants and animals were transferred between Australia, Asia, and Africa. European settlers transported cattle, horses, and…