Sixth Issue of Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review
31.10.2024
How many generations does it take to make a meal? How do we show we care—for humans and for nonhumans alike? When we look up, is it a starry night or a sea of fog? The latest edition of Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review is a meditation on the minutiae and a potential answer to these questions.
At home in Utah, author Christopher Cokinos reflects upon a life of lunar research, as it led him to Tucson, Arizona, and back again, contemplating the expectations we put on places. Cokinos encourages us to stop what we are doing and look up, to sit with the alien terrain, and to ponder “The Place of the Moon” in our lives, histories, and futures.
Although often dubbed the “poor man’s soup,” from the Middle East to the Balkans, the culinary heritage and human traditions of tarhana prove that it is so much more. In “Cultures of Tarhana,” biologist and human geographer Sevgi Mutlu Sirakova explores the fermented staple’s diverse history, from its microbial cultures to its distinct culinary flavors and skills, foregrounding tarhana’s importance to a sustainable future of food.
“Everybody Talks About the Weather” is a historical advertising slogan that encapsulates multiple stories about German environmental politics. As historian Stephen Milder demonstrates how the meaning of the slogan has moved away from a parody of “idle chitchat” and taken on a “radically different, urgent undertone,” the essay reveals how today’s perception of environmental problems differs from that of the 1960s.
If reading about tarhana worked up your appetite, get ready for your second course with writer and cultural historian L. Sasha Gora’s “Stew of the Earth.” Travelling to the town of Furnas, on the Azorean island of São Miguel, Gora guides us through a place where hot springs boil tea and fumaroles simmer stew, and asks us to consider the relationship between environments, ingredients, energy, and being ecological.
Wrestling with the ethics of keeping birds in captivity for human pleasure, “Avian Escapees and Budgie Snugglers” is where historian Kieko Matteson pens her discord. As Matteson looks at ways to harness our attachment to individual companion species, she attests that it is “so much harder to feel comparable passion towards bird’s survival on a larger scale.” Initiatives like the “Feathered Lives Also Count” Act, she proposes, could take the place of cages.
Daniel Dumas’ discussion with critical geographer Elspeth Oppermann begins north of Sydney, in Darwin, Australia’s Top End and Oppermann’s childhood home. Oppermann has developed a novel approach—combining ethnography with thermal physiology—to better understand socio-material and energetic relations between bodies and their environments. From the military to the construction site, “Handling Heat” discusses what it means to work in and on heat in the age of climate change.
Beyond these exciting new articles, Springs continues its efforts to assemble writing from other open-access RCC publications. Our Springs archive curates articles from the online and print journal RCC Perspectives (2010–2020), the peer-reviewed online journal Arcadia: Explorations in Environmental History, and publications from RCC’s multigenre ecopedia, Seeing the Woods.