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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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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Who Is the Planetary Health Diet For?
By André Krebber and Nina Mackert: Food production is a central cause for global environmental degradation and change in ecosystems. In 2019 the EAT-Lancet Commission proposed a “Planetary Health Diet†that defined quantitative limits on food production to tackle this problem and advance both a healthy and ecologically sustainable food system. In this exploration, we…
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Careful Contemplations
By Tyanif Rico RodrÃguez: An examination of contemplative care.
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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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The Strong Who Inspire: A Poem in Memory of Rachel Carson
This short guest post by award-winning nature writer Ellery Akers commemorates one of the worlds greatest conservationists and our intitute’s namesake, Rachel Carson. Carson died on 14 April 1964 at the age of 56. The poem, taken from Ellery’s new book Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance, has been reprodced here with her kind permission. By…
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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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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…