Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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The Case to Go to Mars—And the Hope for the Earth
By David Munns *Featured image: Mars Rover. Image: Idaho National Laboratory, [CC-BY 2.0], via Flicker. We need a “hardy, soiled kind of wisdom,†Donna Haraway wrote in her recent book Staying With the Trouble, if we are to avert disaster from climate change even a little bit. Challenging and controversial, the wisdom Haraway seeks comes…
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A Fluid History of Wisconsin Breweries
By Doug Hoverson During my research for Land of Amber Waters: The History of Brewing in Minnesota, a retired employee of the Theo. Hamm Brewing Co. in St. Paul told me: “Beer is 97 percent water, and the other three percent is none of your damn business.â€
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New Hope for Plastic Waste Pollution?
Hazardous Hope Part 3 By Jonas Stuck In 2016, a new actor entered the main stage and brought new optimism into the fight against plastic waste pollution. Let me introduce Ideonella sakaiensis. A group of researchers from the Kyoto Institute of Technology and Keio University discovered this bacterium outside a plastic bottle recycling factory in…
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CfA: RCC Fellowships 2019–2020
The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society invites applications for its 2019–20 cohort of postdoctoral and senior fellows. The RCC’s fellowship program is designed to bring together excellent scholars from a variety of countries and disciplines who are working in the fields of environment and society. In this application round, the RCC is offering…
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Fixing a Nation’s Plumbing II: What We Choose to Ignore
by Vikas Lakhani This is the second post about India’s National River Linking Project. Read the first part here. As has been clear in the previous post, I see several fundamental objections to the NRLP. First and foremost, environmentalists have rightly raised serious concerns about the ecological consequences of this grand scheme. They argue that…
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Fixing a Nation’s Plumbing I: India’s National River Linking Project
by Vikas Lakhani In 1946, British colonialists launched a grand scheme to cultivate groundnuts in the uninhabitable parts of Tanganyika, a former colony that corresponds to the mainland part of today’s United Republic of Tanzania. Under the leadership of the agronomist John Wakefield, the scheme—named the “Wakefield missionâ€â€”was driven by the desperation to overcome the…
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Making Tracks: Birgit Schneider
By Birgit Schneider I have been interested in representations with a focus on visuality for a very long time. In fact, it wasn’t my early childhood experiences with the outdoors that led to my interest in environmental issues in the first place, but rather my mediated experiences with nature. Like most others, I frequently encounter…
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Gaza’s Happy Hour? When Late Ottoman Palestine Met the Victorian Drinking Culture
By Dotan Halevy If we could travel back in time to the town of Gaza in March 1886, we would probably be joining a large crowd gathered on the beach to catch a glimpse of the Troqueer, a grain-carrying steamship—a behemoth of thirteen hundred tons—lying on its side about a mile offshore.
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Empire in a Bottle: Tales of a Beer Historian
By Malcolm F. Purinton “Why don’t you write your literature review about alcohol?†my African colonialism professor asked me during my master’s degree. “I can do that?!†I replied. The possibility of researching and writing on the history of beer and alcohol was, honestly, mind-blowing.