Syllabi in Environment and Society

Short profiles of university and course syllabi, and collaborative syllabi projects on Environment and Society.

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“Radical Environmentalism’s Print History: From Earth First! to Wild Earth.”

In this essay (updated in 2019), Bron Taylor offers background about the events that gave rise to the Earth First! movement and reviews some of the watershed moments in its history, including its print publications.

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The Story of Geology

Sonji Shah’s “The Story of Geology” is a clever take on the “lithic imaginary” in Bjornerud, Jemisin, and Macfarlane, showing how underground worlds can excite new thoughts on what it means to belong to the earth. It was one of the two honorable mentions in the reflective essay category of the RCC environmental writing competition “Tell the Untold!”

Amitav Ghosh in Munich: Inspirations, Insights, and Storytelling

In the fall of 2024, Amitav Ghosh visited the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society as part of the project “One Book—Many Worlds: Munich Reads Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh.” This exhibition emerges from the multifaceted discussion of climate change and its challenges conducted in the “One Book—Many Worlds” project and grapples with the question of the role of literary fiction in interdisciplinary academic exchange and climate communication beyond academia. Taking Amitav Ghosh’s recent writings on the global climate crisis, in particular the novel Gun Island, as a vantage point, the chapters in this exhibition engage with various aspects Gun Island from different disciplinary perspectives, drawing on storylines and narrative elements that allow a multifocal engagement with different social and ecological repercussions of climate change. Additionally, pieces from the spring 2025 taumelnd trauen, verschlungen bleiben student exhibition and winning and honorable mentions from the 2025 “Tell the Untold!” writing competition take the provocation to think creatively about the past and future of our environment and world further. Thereby, the exhibition chapters create a web of diverse thoughts on and readings of the role of storytelling for the contemporary interlinked social and environmental crises from a number of perspectives.

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Shah, Sonji

University of Cambridge, UK

Sonji Shah is a writer and researcher based in London. They are currently working on a PhD in English literature at the University of Cambridge, with a focus on planetarity, geo(in)humanities, speculative fiction, and relational ethics. They also write short stories and poetry. Recent papers include “Unearthing the Archive: Silver Mining in Contemporary Speculative Fiction” at Eaton Conference of Speculative Fiction at UC Riverside and “Lithospheric Memory in the Broken Earth Trilogy” at Congreso Alas de Tinta, Complutense University of Madrid.

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Time After the Hero—Or, in Proposing the Age of the Anthropoiescene

The Age of the Anthropoiescene is a time of sympoietic tanglings with the human and more-than-human ghosts of deep time.

Amitav Ghosh in Munich: Inspirations, Insights, and Storytelling

In the fall of 2024, Amitav Ghosh visited the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society as part of the project “One Book—Many Worlds: Munich Reads Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh.” This exhibition emerges from the multifaceted discussion of climate change and its challenges conducted in the “One Book—Many Worlds” project and grapples with the question of the role of literary fiction in interdisciplinary academic exchange and climate communication beyond academia. Taking Amitav Ghosh’s recent writings on the global climate crisis, in particular the novel Gun Island, as a vantage point, the chapters in this exhibition engage with various aspects Gun Island from different disciplinary perspectives, drawing on storylines and narrative elements that allow a multifocal engagement with different social and ecological repercussions of climate change. Additionally, pieces from the spring 2025 taumelnd trauen, verschlungen bleiben student exhibition and winning and honorable mentions from the 2025 “Tell the Untold!” writing competition take the provocation to think creatively about the past and future of our environment and world further. Thereby, the exhibition chapters create a web of diverse thoughts on and readings of the role of storytelling for the contemporary interlinked social and environmental crises from a number of perspectives.

About This Exhibition

About the author

Fraillon, Zana

Zana Fraillon is the internationally acclaimed and multi-award-winning author of 18 books for children and young adults. Her work is published in The Big Issue, The Guardian, Island Magazine, Dark Mountain, Sans. PRESS, and Abridged. Having completed her PhD exploring future ancestorship and everyday engagement with voices from the deep past, she now officially is a doctor of ghosts.

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Ten Theses on Climate Justice and Migration: Reading Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island from a Christian Social-Ethics Perspective

Reflections on Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island by Markus Vogt.

Amitav Ghosh in Munich: Inspirations, Insights, and Storytelling

In the fall of 2024, Amitav Ghosh visited the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society as part of the project “One Book—Many Worlds: Munich Reads Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh.” This exhibition emerges from the multifaceted discussion of climate change and its challenges conducted in the “One Book—Many Worlds” project and grapples with the question of the role of literary fiction in interdisciplinary academic exchange and climate communication beyond academia. Taking Amitav Ghosh’s recent writings on the global climate crisis, in particular the novel Gun Island, as a vantage point, the chapters in this exhibition engage with various aspects Gun Island from different disciplinary perspectives, drawing on storylines and narrative elements that allow a multifocal engagement with different social and ecological repercussions of climate change. Additionally, pieces from the spring 2025 taumelnd trauen, verschlungen bleiben student exhibition and winning and honorable mentions from the 2025 “Tell the Untold!” writing competition take the provocation to think creatively about the past and future of our environment and world further. Thereby, the exhibition chapters create a web of diverse thoughts on and readings of the role of storytelling for the contemporary interlinked social and environmental crises from a number of perspectives.

About This Exhibition

About the author

Vogt, Markus

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU), Germany

Markus Vogt is the chair for Christian social ethics at LMU Munich. He studied philosophy and Catholic theology in Munich, Jerusalem, and Lucerne. He has worked for the German Advisory Council on the Environment and was head environmental advisor to the German Bishops’ Conference. He previously taught as a professor of Christian social ethics at the Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule der Salesianer Don Boscos in Benediktbeuern near Munich. In 2011–12, he held a research professorship at the Rachel Carson Center, and has been a permanent fellow there ever since.

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A Few Hazy Anthropocenes

Tathagat Bhatia’s “A Few Hazy Anthropocenes” is a skilfully controlled reflection on haze as both a form of air pollution and a metaphor for the uncertainty of our times. It was one of the two honorable mentions in the nonfiction category of the RCC environmental writing competition “Tell the Untold!”

Amitav Ghosh in Munich: Inspirations, Insights, and Storytelling

In the fall of 2024, Amitav Ghosh visited the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society as part of the project “One Book—Many Worlds: Munich Reads Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh.” This exhibition emerges from the multifaceted discussion of climate change and its challenges conducted in the “One Book—Many Worlds” project and grapples with the question of the role of literary fiction in interdisciplinary academic exchange and climate communication beyond academia. Taking Amitav Ghosh’s recent writings on the global climate crisis, in particular the novel Gun Island, as a vantage point, the chapters in this exhibition engage with various aspects Gun Island from different disciplinary perspectives, drawing on storylines and narrative elements that allow a multifocal engagement with different social and ecological repercussions of climate change. Additionally, pieces from the spring 2025 taumelnd trauen, verschlungen bleiben student exhibition and winning and honorable mentions from the 2025 “Tell the Untold!” writing competition take the provocation to think creatively about the past and future of our environment and world further. Thereby, the exhibition chapters create a web of diverse thoughts on and readings of the role of storytelling for the contemporary interlinked social and environmental crises from a number of perspectives.

About This Exhibition

About the author

Bhatia, Tathagat

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Tathagat Bhatia is a PhD student in the History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS) Program at MIT. Originally from Lucknow, India, Tathagat studies at the intersection of environmental history and the history of science, with a regional focus on modern South Asia and the Soviet Union. Prior to graduate studies, they worked as a reporter for The Times of India.

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About This Exhibition

Introductory notes on the virtual exhibition Amitav Ghosh in Munich.

Amitav Ghosh in Munich: Inspirations, Insights, and Storytelling

In the fall of 2024, Amitav Ghosh visited the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society as part of the project “One Book—Many Worlds: Munich Reads Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh.” This exhibition emerges from the multifaceted discussion of climate change and its challenges conducted in the “One Book—Many Worlds” project and grapples with the question of the role of literary fiction in interdisciplinary academic exchange and climate communication beyond academia. Taking Amitav Ghosh’s recent writings on the global climate crisis, in particular the novel Gun Island, as a vantage point, the chapters in this exhibition engage with various aspects Gun Island from different disciplinary perspectives, drawing on storylines and narrative elements that allow a multifocal engagement with different social and ecological repercussions of climate change. Additionally, pieces from the spring 2025 taumelnd trauen, verschlungen bleiben student exhibition and winning and honorable mentions from the 2025 “Tell the Untold!” writing competition take the provocation to think creatively about the past and future of our environment and world further. Thereby, the exhibition chapters create a web of diverse thoughts on and readings of the role of storytelling for the contemporary interlinked social and environmental crises from a number of perspectives.

About This Exhibition

About the author

Straß-Senol, Hanna

Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich, Germany

I joined the Rachel Carson Center as codirector of the project “Strengthening the Environmental Humanities” in 2020. I am passionate about literature, the ocean, and eight-armed marine creatures. My research interests and teaching foci in the environmental humanities include environmental literary and cultural studies (specifically postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental justice), sea literature, and theories of globalization and migration.

Bax, Franziska

Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich, Germany

I am studying in the MA program of the Rachel Carson Center and joined the “Strengthening the Environmental Humanities” project in April 2024 as a student assistant. I am currently weaving together my background in artistic research, my curiosity for curation as a knowledge-making practice, and my interests in decolonial land relations, cultural narratives, and peatlands.

Antonova, Anna

Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich, Germany

I currently work at the Rachel Carson Center, where I have been directing the “Strengthening the Environmental Humanities” project together with Hanna Straß-Senol since 2020, and simultaneously conducting research on environmental and societal transitions on Europe’s coastlines. My research combines approaches from critical policy studies, environmental humanities, and marine social science.

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“Growing Up amid Environmental Change: A Conversation with Jan David Hauck”

Jan David Hauck and Pooja Nayak discuss how changing environments change our language and morals.

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“The Inhuman Condition: Rethinking Anthropocentrism”

In an increasingly inhumane world, this article argues that socioecological justice can only be achieved by embracing human nature.

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“Staying Open: Shaping Environmental History in Sweden”

A reflection on how environmental history emerged in Sweden.

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