“One Book – Many Worlds”: Highlights from a Six-Month Interdisciplinary Project

During the winter semester 2024–2025, “One Book – Many Worlds,” a project organized by the Rachel Carson Center’s (RCC) Environmental Humanities Development Team led by Hanna Straß-Senol and Anna Antonova, encouraged researchers, students, and residents in Munich to read Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island. Through a series of organized events, the project inspired people to discuss the book and its themes from a perspective of culture and the humanities, touching upon challenges like global warming, climate migration, and mass extinction.

The project’s events series was set in motion in October 2024 with a screening of the film Anthropocene: The Human Epoch. Directed by Nick de Pencier, Jennifer Baichwal, and Edward Burtynsky, the film depicts how humans systematically destroy the planet through their actions. The screening was part of the Green Visions film series, a cooperation between the Rachel Carson Center, DOK.fest München, and the Münchner Volkshochschule .

One month after the film screening, in November 2024, Amitav Ghosh arrived in Munich. In a matinée at the Literaturhaus München on 17 November, the RCC hosted an event for Ghosh to read passages from his nonfiction book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021), and his 2024 novel Gun Island. The reading, performed by Helmut Becker, was followed by a conversation with Hanna Straß-Senol, which illuminated Ghosh’s views that the contemporary fundamental environmental changes originated in humanity’s colonial past. Ghosh highlighted his preference of referring to “a world of radical discontinuity” instead of “climate change,” a term which he pointed out reduces the issue to an expert-only discourse. The event ended with a book signing.

The discussion at the Literaturhaus kicked off a series of events with Amitav Ghosh held the following week. On 18 November, the author visited the RCC and shared a few words with the members of its community at a casual afternoon coffee session. On 19 November, the general public had the opportunity to interact with Ghosh in an exclusive workshop, “Thinking the Unthinkable, Writing the Improbable,” at the Ökologisches Bildungszentrum in collaboration with the Münchner Volkshochschule (MVHS). Together with Ghosh, workshop attendants learned how creative writing can address the challenges of the planet’s environmental crisis. The workshop encouraged participants to not only think about the negative aspects of climate change but also to engage in stories of future-oriented hope and aspiration.

Ghosh’s visit to Munich culminated on 20 November with a public lecture at the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU Munich) main building entitled “Hiding from the Apocalypse. How the World’s Wealthiest view the Future.” In this lecture, Ghosh discussed the implications of the world’s richest people preparing for upcoming environmental disasters by building bunkers. After his eye-opening presentation, the crowd was invited to ask questions, which resulted in a fruitful discussion about societal vulnerabilities and the need for systemic change.

The next phase of the project consisted of numerous interdisciplinary discussions, as experts representing different disciplinary perspectives exchanged ideas on the themes of Gun Island. These short lectures took place as a part of the RCC’s Lunchtime Colloquium. The first discussion, between Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Nakul Heroor (“Discourses on Rising Waters: Stories and Politics,” 21 November 2024), examined the intersection of imperialism, narrative storytelling, and environmental issues, with a primary focus on militarization’s role in climate change and the challenges of representing these themes in literature around the world. The second lecture, Laura Otto’s “Climate, Coastal Migration, and Violence: Perspectives from Literary Studies and Anthropology” (5 December 2024), examined the relationship between ecosystems and migration, connecting power narratives between the human and more-than-human world. When Imke Hoppe and Helge Nowak introduced us to the role of fiction in communicating the environmental crisis with their talk (“Communicating the Unthinkable: Climate Change in Literary Studies and Human Geography,” 9 January 2025), they utilized their professional insights to demonstrate to the audience the importance of storytelling when it comes to environmental issues. During the following week, Anke Friedrich and Markus Vogt (“Earth Shattered: Geology and Ethics,” 16 January 2025) provided an insightful discussion on the perspectives of two (supposedly) different disciplines—geology and ethics. Although the two speakers disagreed on several points, their dialogue inspired a holistic and empathetic approach to the environmental crisis. With the final entry in the lecture series (“Climate Communication in Education beyond Academia,” 23 January 2025), Julia Ludewig talked about the various ways in which she has integrates environmental issues into her university teaching and Sabina Magagnoli illustrated how she encourages Italian school children to acquire knowledge about the climate crisis. The pairing of these two speakers aptly demonstrated how participation and encouragement can be beneficial tools in helping young people explore their own works.

The “One Book – Many Worlds” project drew to a close with a screening of the film Echoes from Borderland on 25 February 2025 hosted by the Münchner Volkshochschule. The film, which demonstrates how migration stories are often marked by fear, violence, and a sense of displacement, themes that are also present in Ghosh’s novel Gun Island, rounded out the series of events fittingly.

During the semester, different lecturers at LMU engaged with Gun Island in their courses, including Katie Ritson in her seminar “Literatur mit Ausblick. Die Natur in der Kultur Skandinaviens” taught at the Institute for Scandinavian Studies, Juliane Prade-Weiss and Nakul Heroor in the comparative literature reading course “Weltliteratur: Amitav Ghoshs ‘Gun Island,’” and Sarah Fekadu-Uthoff in the English literary seminar “Ecology and Empire: Literature, Nature, Culture in the 19th Century (and Beyond).” In their joint lecture at the Munich Science Communication Lab Colloquium (“The Planetary Uncanny: More-Than-Human Entanglements and the Planetary Health Humanities,” 28 January 2025), Leonie N. Bossert and Davina Höll referenced Ghosh’s work, exploring the links between human-induced anthropogenic changes to the planet and their consequences by focusing on pandemics.

An elective seminar of the RCC’s master’s program “Environment and Society,” entitled “One Book – Many Worlds: Exhibition Studio,” continued the discussion of these themes. Through workshops, readings, and discussions, students learned how to interact with displacement and environmental issues on multiple levels, and they developed a feeling for the precarity of both migration and environmental destruction. For their seminar’s final project, the students created an art exhibition using objects based on passages from Gun Island. The exhibition will open on 3 April 2025 at the Ökologisches Bildungszentrum, and will curate the display until 4 May 2025. The MA students warmly invite all who may be interested to join them at the formal opening on 3 April at 17:30 (see also the attached poster for the vernissage below).