About the Journal
Please note that this is an archive. The official publication you will find on this page.
Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review is an open-access online publication for peer-reviewed articles, creative nonfiction, and artistic contributions that showcase the work of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC) and its community across the world. In the spirit of Rachel Carson, it publishes sharp writing with an impact. Surveying the interrelationship between environmental and social changes from a wealth of disciplines and perspectives, it is a place to share rigorous research, test out fresh ideas, question old ones, and to advance public and scholarly debates in the environmental humanities and beyond.
Published biannually, Springs features a range of content, from text and photography to audio and video. It also brings together writing from other Rachel Carson Center publications. The Springs archive curates articles that were originally published in the open-access online and print journal RCC Perspectives (2010–2020), in the Rachel Carson Center blog Seeing the Woods (2012–2021), and in the peer-reviewed online journal Arcadia: Explorations in Environmental History.
Springs launched in 2022 as part of a Kolleg-Project funded by the Federal Ministry of Research and Education (Käte Hamburger Kolleg). The project is run by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC).
How do I contribute to Springs?
Currently, submissions to Springs are by invitation only. For open calls check the RCC's other publishing platform Arcadia. Anyone may submit to Arcadia; please visit this page to read the guidelines.
Unless otherwise stated, Springs articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
With any questions, please email the editorial team at editors@rcc.lmu.de.
Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review – ISSN 2751-9317
Current Issue
We read the news about torrential rain in some distant place, separated from it by our screens. We add a grating of fresh nutmeg to our food, in ignorance of the spice’s cultural history. We walk along a riverbank and see water, little water, only to find that there used to be more. The seventh issue of Springs ponders on emplacement and visibility, takes us through the centuries, and echoes an urgent call to attend to nonhuman sentience. Catherine Bush walks the streets of Venice, seeking art that engages with Rachel Carson at the Biennale Arte 2024. In “The Unbearable Weight of Displaced Weather,” Mike Hulme looks at sociotechnical developments that have changed the climate and the way we experience the weather. Amitav Ghosh takes us to the Banda Islands to unravel “The Nutmeg’s Curse.” “Walking a Sicilian River” by Paolo Gruppuso and Erika Garozzo ruminates on the life of Sicily’s largest but now disappearing river—the Simeto. Processing the horrid February 2025 “Killing [of] a Baboon” by a group of schoolchildren in South Africa, Sandra Swart looks back at history and examines the role of superstition and the occult in the ongoing violence against these primates. In the final contribution, Mascha Gugganig and Judith Bopp discuss “Organic Farming in Thailand” and prevailing narratives about agriculture.
