About the Journal
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
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.
