Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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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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The King of Fruits Needs Space
By Judith Bopp: On a particularly hot and dry morning in early May, my friend—a local farmer—and I loaded a canoe into the car and made our way to the Huai Raeng Reservoir in Thailand’s Trat Province, not far from the Cambodian border. Parked along the shore when we arrived were several pickup trucks with…
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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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Green Talks: Barbro Soller and the Emergence of Modern Environmentalism in 1960s Sweden
*Featured image: The modern villa family, on the front page of the Dagens Nyheter newspaper, 4 November 1968. ©Dagens Nyheters digital archive, used with kind permission. By David Larsson Heidenblad The historiography of modern environmentalism revolves around scientists, intellectuals, activists, and politicians. Hence, we know much about the likes of Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner, the formation…
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Green Talks: Looking Behind the Scenes of Environmental Journalism
In this new series edited by Maximilian Feichtner, Jonas Stuck, and Ayushi Dhawan of the DFG Emmy-Noether Research Group Hazardous Travels. Ghost Acres and the Global Waste Economy, the authors take a look into the role of environmental journalism in communicating science and spurring change, as well as the challenges journalists face in documenting and…
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Uses of Environmental Humanities: Nicole Seymour
The Uses of Environmental Humanities series explores diverse and creative ways of thinking with the Environmental Humanities in responding to socio-environmental challenges. Contributors address the influence of the Environmental Humanities and ways in which we might use this field of study, offering insights into the interactions between societies, science, politics, and culture. The series is…
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On Environmental Grief and the Rights of Nature
Guest post by Kriss Kevorkian *Featured image: Jill Hein Twenty years ago, when I first coined the term environmental grief—the grief reaction stemming from the environmental loss of ecosystems caused by either natural or human-made events—I thought I was the only one grieving the destruction and ecocide I saw taking place around me. Fortunately, a…
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Hope in the Murky Waters of the International Shipping Industry
Hazardous Hope Part 2 By Ayushi Dhawan (*Featured image: CTG. Ship Breaking 06. Photo by Naquib Hossain [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Flickr) This summer, I went on a field trip to Alang-Sosiya in the northwestern state of Gujarat, India, where geriatric vessels are anchored in the shipbreaking yards for their not-so-respectful funeral rights. They are taken apart…
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Making Tracks: Teresa Spezio
By Teresia Spezio As a child, I had first-hand experience with air and water pollution. I grew up in the city of Pittsburgh, which was once the steel making capital of the United States. I remember trips on the Parkway East with my family driving past the Jones & Laughlin primary steel mill where men…