Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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Mumbai Deluge 2017: Nowadays Rain Gods Have a New Tool—Plastic Bags!
by Ayushi Dhawan We often do not think twice before buying a plastic bag at a supermarket or a shopping mall. It’s bought because it’s needed and discarded after being used for a short while. How harmful can these everyday practices be to our environment? Mumbai’s recent floods definitely have a story to tell in…
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Asia and the Pacific: Environments—Cultures—Histories
Workshop Report (LMU-ChAN Satellite Conference, 3–5 November 2017, Rachel Carson Center, Munich, Germany) by Travis Klingberg (All sketches by Libby Robin) Flood-proof cities. The social costs of waste incineration. Water level changes in the Pearl River Delta. The environmental impact of nineteenth-century Chinese immigration across the Pacific. These are a sample of the topics discussed…
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Toxic Floods: Let’s Talk about the Weather
By Simone M. Müller We’ve probably all been thinking about the weather lately. Our officemates are sneezing, others are coughing, the first one is turning in a sick note. It’s the time of year when weather-related topics start dominating our everyday conversation: the change of the season, the turning of the leaves from deep green…
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Introducing “Trash Talks,†a New Series on Our Everyday Encounters with Hazardous Waste
Hazardous waste surrounds us. We may not realize it, but toxic, hazardous, and harmful waste objects are part of our everyday encounters. They form part of our daily routines of consumption, mobility, work, leisure, and travel. We could stumble across a hazardous waste story when watching the news or going shopping. Often these stories are…
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Ecopolis München: Ecopolis Night
“A Student Exhibition on Munich’s Environmental Histories†All photographs courtesy of Florin Prună. In late July, students of the RCC’s Environmental Studies Certificate Program organized Ecopolis München: Umweltgeschichten einer Stadt. This interactive multimedia exhibition showcased Munich’s environmental histories through the students’ final projects, and was curated by doctoral candidate Sasha Gora, research assistant Raphaela Holzer, and…
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Worldview: One Piece at a Time
Guest post by Judith Selby and Richard Lang Judith Selby and Richard Lang are artists who collaborate in an ongoing project to collect plastic along Kehoe Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore. They also recount their adventures in Plastic Forever, the blog they jointly manage. This is a  follow-up post to last week’s Snaphot on Seeing the Woods.…
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Snapshot: Plastic Beach
Guest post by Judith Selby and Richard Lang Judith Selby and Richard Lang are artists who collaborate in an ongoing project to collect plastic along Kehoe Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore. They also recount their adventures in Plastic Forever, the blog they jointly manage. Stay tuned for the follow-up post on their work on Seeing the…
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Snapshot: Our Future in the Anthropocene
On 15 September the Deutsches Museum hosted a Zukunftskongress (Future Congress) together with the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Club of Rome; the event brought together international visionaries, experts, and activists to discuss ways to tackle problems such as climate change and hunger and move towards a more sustainable society.
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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…