Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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Food for an Abundant Future
By Pollyanna Rhee: “The future of farming. The future of food.†The website for Kernza® displays little modesty about its ambitions. It’s not a surprise that the producer of a good meant for the consumer market would be hyperbolic in their promises, but others have found the claim enticing. “Could Superwheat Kernza Save Our Soil? 
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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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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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Opplevelser I Stavanger
(Adventures in Stavanger) In this mini series you can read about the experiences of Johanna Felber and Malin Klinski, candidates of the RCC’s Environmental Studies Certificate program, during an exchange program with the University of Stavanger in Norway. If you want to find out more about life in the land of the midnight sun, trolls, and vikings, you are in the right place… By…
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A Whale of a Time
*Featured image: Sperm whales under attack, from Thomas Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839). Photo: The New York Public Library via rawpixel, public domain. By: Daniel Dumas Zodiac crossings of rough seas, imperial expansion, and narratives of resistance and resilience. This is not the backdrop of an action flick coming to the…
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Overcoming the Fear Factor: Teaching and Learning about Insects and Biodiversity
By Tony Weis Insects have fascinated Nina Zitani for as long as she can remember. She vividly recalls making her first bug collection at age five, and searching for insects and other arthropods in her backyard and nearby forests in Moorestown, New Jersey, throughout her childhood.
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Contested Ecologies: Munich
By: Clemens Hufeld Munich is a beautiful city that has much to offer. It has the Oktoberfest, one of the world’s largest urban fairs, surfers in the middle of the city, beautiful landscapes in its vicinity, and a long tradition of urban life. The city is shrouded in such a wonderful air of beauty that…
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2020 Visions for Environmental History: Making Environmental History as Global as Possible
This is the third post in a series on “2020 Visions for Environmental History†being published jointly by NiCHE’s blog The Otter ~ La loutre and Rachel Carson Center’s blog Seeing the Woods, with posts by Lisa Mighetto, Alan MacEachern, Arielle Helmick, and Claudia Leal. The series developed alongside a session of the same name at the World Congress for Environmental History in late July.…
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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…