Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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Hazardous Cruises: Welcome to Toxic Paradise
by Jonas Stuck The summer is over, but the holiday season hasn’t stopped. Going on vacation is how many people calm down from a hectic work life and enjoy a good time. Cruise ships offer this experience all year round in the most naturally beautiful holiday destinations in the world: from the Arctic Circle or…
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Snapshot: Beach Litter in a Sustainable Exhibition
By Katrin Kleemann A few weeks ago, “Snapshot: Zero Waste?” featured an exhibition exploring global waste production. Today’s feature looks at what happens to that waste. As part of its Planet Oceans Initiative, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich hosts one of London’s first sustainable galleries: the “Environment Gallery.” It’s sustainable because all of the displays are made…
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Bookshelf: Jens Kersten on Inwastement—Abfall in Umwelt und Gesellschaft
The Inwastement volume arose from the research cluster “Waste and Society” of the RCC together with LMU’s Center for Advanced Studies. Published in German by Transcript, the issue includes contributions from: Soraya Heuss-Aßbichler, Claudia R. Binder, Eveline Dürr, Gisela Grupe, Rüdiger Haum, Michael Jedelhauser, Jens Kersten, Roman Köster, Reinhold Leinfelder, Christof Mauch, Wolfram Mauser, Karen Pittel, Gerhard Rettenberger,…
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Lunchtime Colloquia, Winter Semester 2015/2016
Lise Sedrez on “A Man, a Woman and an Island in Guanabara Bay: How Two Scientists Turned a Hydrobiology Station into a Pollution Monitoring Center in 1950s Rio de Janeiro” Kirsten Wehner on “Towards an Ecological Museology: Integrating ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ at the National Museum of Australia” Filippo Bertoni on “Extracting Life: Open…
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Interview: Lise Sedrez on the Samarco Tailings Dam Spill, Minas Gerais, Brazil (Part Two)
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:…
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Worldview: Antarctica
by Ingo Heidbrink Antarctica is the only continent with a permanent population of zero, and it has a strong international regulation system governing human activities from research to tourism. One might question whether an environmental history of Antarctica, beyond natural history, could therefore even be possible. While I am no native or citizen of Antarctica—these…
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Photo of the Week: Anna Rühl
With over 250 days of sunshine a year, Mongolians call their country the Land of the Blue Sky. Except sometimes it’s not. On a winter’s day in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar—home to approximately half of the country’s population of three million—air pollution can be so bad that the weather forecast reads “smoke,” and it…
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Photo of the Week: Annka Liepold
Kuta Beach, Bali, during “Trash Season.” On top of the regular daily trash left behind at the beaches, this is a phenomenon that occurs annually between the end of December and the end of February. Because of strong winds, plastic discarded in the ocean in Java is washed ashore on the beaches of Bali’s southwestern…