All that is Solid: Castlereagh 1999

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Perspectives Issue 2013/5

Grace Karskens examines the tension between urban development and the preservation of historical and cultural landscapes along Castlereagh Road near the Nepean River in Sydney.

What Cannot Be Unearthed

Wan Yin Kim Fung’s “What Cannot Be Unearthed” is a sensitively told account that quite literally gives pause to the toxic fallout of nineteenth- and twentieth-century copper mining in eastern Japan. 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

Fung, Wan Yin Kimberly

Hitotsubashi University, Japan

Fung Wan Yin Kimberly is an anthropologist and writer whose work explores the material afterlives of extraction in Japan and beyond. She investigates socioecological change in and after post–mining transitions, with broader interests in how communities inhabit damaged landscapes, pursue restoration, and imagine alternative environmental futures. Her doctoral dissertation is a multisited ethnography of Japan’s first major industrial-pollution disaster, the Ashio Copper Mine Pollution Incident. Over the course of 29 months of fieldwork, she traced the lived engagements of toxicity within communities and worked alongside grassroots groups engaged in restoration work, including reforestation and wetland conservation, which she continues to participate in. Part of her research has been published on research blogs and presented in exhibitions. Born in Hong Kong and currently based in Tokyo, Kimberly writes in English, Chinese, and Japanese. Her writing spans from scholarly pieces to community and public-facing essays, and she is currently developing her doctoral work into both academic manuscripts and nonfiction writings. Beyond writing, she also contributes to cultural and artistic projects as a translator, interpreter, facilitator, and organizer. She draws inspiration from documentaries, poetry, exhibitions, and woodblock prints.

Browse the exhibition

“Visual Tailings” (manuscript draft)

Prepublished draft of a Emmanuelle Roth’s and Gregg Mitman’s article “Visual Tailings.”

Read more about “Visual Tailings” (manuscript draft)

“The Value of Fragments: Making a Hotspot in Mount Nimba, Liberia”

Emmanuelle Roth and Gregg Mitman write about how capitalism fragments nature to create value. Such fragments can precipitate biodiversity loss.

Read more about “The Value of Fragments: Making a Hotspot in Mount Nimba, Liberia”

Dreams of Optimizing the Ocean: The 1970 Deepsea Ventures Mining Test and Artificial Upwelling

by Yoram Carboex

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Arcadia, Spring 2024, no. 2

Read more about Dreams of Optimizing the Ocean: The 1970 Deepsea Ventures Mining Test and Artificial Upwelling

Hydroelectric Power and the Ashio Copper Mine

by James Morris

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Arcadia, Summer 2023, no. 17

Read more about Hydroelectric Power and the Ashio Copper Mine

Visions of a Nuclear Apocalypse: Notions of Nature in the 1970s Antinuclear Movement

by Robyn Gulliver

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Arcadia, Summer 2023, no. 9

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The Struggle for Air: Mining, Dust, and Death on the South African Rand

by Duncan Money

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Arcadia, Spring 2023, no. 6

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Interview with Rocio Gomez, author of Silver Veins, Dusty Lungs: Mining, Water, and Public Health in Zacatecas, 1835–1946

In this episode from the New Books Network podcast, Rocio Gomez is interviewed on her book, Silver Veins, Dusty Lungs: Mining, Water, and Public Health in Zacatecas, 1835–1946.

Read more about Interview with Rocio Gomez, author of Silver Veins, Dusty Lungs: Mining, Water, and Public Health in Zacatecas, 1835–1946

“The battle of geological experts”: Water Flow and Tunneling within a Welsh Mountain

by Mark Nuttall

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Arcadia, Spring 2021, no. 14

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