Short profiles of university and course syllabi, and collaborative syllabi projects on Environment and Society.
The Age of the Anthropoiescene is a time of sympoietic tanglings with the human and more-than-human ghosts of deep time.
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
Dive into a pivotal 1993 lecture by renowned Professor Bron Taylor as he unravels the complex tapestry of the American conservation movement. This insightful presentation offers a panoramic view, tracing the philosophical and spiritual roots that shaped environmental thought and action, particularly focusing on the rise of the deep ecology movement and what Taylor terms “pagan environmentalism.”
The lecture features environmental activist Dave Foreman, introduced by Bron Taylor at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh in 1990. The event situates Foreman’s ideas within the emerging discourse on radical environmentalism and its ethical foundations.
Human geographer Mike Hulme looks at sociotechnical developments that have changed the climate and, at the same time, the way we experience the weather.
Writer and anthropologist Amitav Ghosh takes us to the Banda Islands to unravel “The Nutmeg’s Curse.”
Processing the horrid February 2025 “Killing [of] a Baboon” by a group of schoolchildren in Delmas, South Africa, Sandra Swart looks back at history and examines the role of superstition and the occult in the ongoing violence against these primates.
Julia Adeney Thomas explores three types of narrative that are emerging as people try to get to grips with the Anthropocene and their potential for steering our future course.
