Donald Worster recounts his trajectory from a Dust Bowl refugee in California to a foundational figure in environmental history.
Claudia Leal reflects on her intellectual formation through childhood travels in Colombia and later work in education and biodiversity conservation.
Reflections on Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island by Julia Ludewig.
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
Reflections on curating the virtual exhibition Amitav Ghosh in Munich by Franziska Bax.
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
A brief history of the universe from the big bang to the Anthropocene, as related by someone older and wiser than all of it. A fable for clever beasts. A bedtime story for a species.
Full open-access volume Moving Deserts: Interrogating Development and Resilience in the Pastoral Drylands of Northern Kenya (2025) by Greta Semplici.
The second chapter of”Wetland Times,” “Narratives.”
Wetlands are ecologically dynamic and vulnerable landscapes where multiple temporalities, human and nonhuman, intersect and challenge one another. This virtual exhibition explores the dynamic temporalities of wetlands and their complex relationships—the temporal imaginaries, narratives, structures, flows, (a)synchronicities, and ruptures they contain—framed by a conceptual vocabulary that reveals the role of language in understanding wetland times and temporalities. Our examples draw on case studies from three wetlands: the Wadden Sea in Northern Europe; Morecambe Bay, in the northwest of the United Kingdom; and the Dja-et-Lobo region in southern Cameroon, focusing specifically on wetland areas near settlements of the Baka People.
About the Exhibition
Full volume of Nordic Climate Histories: Impacts, Pathways, Narratives, edited by Dominik Collet, Ingar Mørkestøl Gundersen, Heli Huhtamaa, Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist, Astrid E.J. Ogilvie, and Sam White.
Katie Ritson reflects on the changing North Sea coast, linking its geological history and literature to the bigger picture of time and hope.
In the introduction, Elin Kelsey argues for balancing negative environmental narratives with messages of hope to inspire positive action.
