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.

Ecopolis München 2019: Environmental Stories of Discovery

Ecopolis München 2019: Environmental Stories of Discovery is an exhibition on Munich’s environmental histories. It showcases the final projects of students in the Environmental Studies Certificate Program of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. The stories told in this exhibition ask: to whom does the urban world belong and what do we want the urban environment of the future to look like?

Wilderness Babel: What Does Wilderness Mean in Your Language?

What does wilderness mean in your language? Listen to words for “wilderness” and learn about their political and historical meanings in different regional contexts. “Wilderness Babel” is a collaboration with the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich, edited by Marcus Hall and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg. Its international contributions are still growing.

This version 2, published in 2020, includes minor updates to the original 2013 virtual exhibition (view PDF here) and applies the Environment & Society Portal’s responsive layout.

Global Environments: A 360º Visual Journey

Communicating global environmental issues in new and exciting ways can lead to a better public understanding of academic research. The international doctoral researchers of the ENHANCE Innovative Training Network (ITN) present their interdisciplinary projects through short, immersive videos, accompanied by analytical contextualization. These six 360º videos and one multiple-screen video triptych, shot in different countries and ecosystems, aim to bring people closer to an in situ experience of global environments, their complexities, and our relationship to them.