No. 5 (2024)

The fifth issue of Springs is an odyssey from the cold depths of a northern German lake to the warm dunes of southern Portugal. Jessica Lee travels to the German village of Neuglobsow to uncover a region shaped by the intangible legends of ferocious red roosters as well as by the tangible impact of a nearby nuclear power plant. A new, re-enchanting vocabulary for the misunderstood kingdom of fungi, giving an organism “agency” through language, is, as Alison Pouliot contends, the first step toward a more mainstream recognition. When RCC Director Christof Mauch sits down with Martin Saxer, it is to discuss what makes the spatially unconfined practice of contemporary foraging different from the that of hunter–gatherers. Anthropologist Emmanuelle Roth and historian Gregg Mitman follow a local park ranger through the Nimba mountain range to investigate how the region’s complex history has altered relations among its living and nonliving occupants. Along the shoreline of a small beaver pond in Maine, writer and historian Beth LaDow regales us with a story of the quirky relationship between humans and beavers and gives us a glimpse into the everyday life of the wetlands they create. Joana Gaspar de Freitas reckons with her self-professed transitory muses: sand dunes. Among the shifting slopes of southern Portugal’s human-shaped shoreline, the product of a decades-long beach nourishment project, Joana’s personal history and her professional research collide.