Rachel Carson Center

The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC) is an international research center dedicated to the study of environment and society from a wealth of different disciplines and international perspectives.


The RCC’s mission is to advance education, research, and international cooperation in the field of the environmental humanities and social sciences. It contributes to public and scholarly debates about future ecological and social challenges. By bringing together scholars from various disciplines and national contexts and making a continuous effort to communicate their research to the wider public, the RCC aims to internationalize and raise the profile of the environmental humanities as a globally significant and growing field. To achieve this, the RCC is committed to supporting the publication of state-of-the-art research in the environmental humanities that bridges national and disciplinary divides.

Journals

  • Springs

    Springs

    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.

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  • Arcadia

    Arcadia

    Arcadia: Explorations in Environmental History is an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal for short, illustrated, and engaging environmental histories. Embedded in a particular time and place, each story focuses on a site, event, person, organization, or species as it relates to nature and human society. The journal promotes accessibility and visibility of original research in global environmental history and cognate disciplines.

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  • Virtual Exhibitions

    Virtual Exhibitions

    Virtual Exhibitions are born‐digital, peer‐reviewed projects published by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. Curated by experts in the environmental humanities, they contextualize and interpret collections of digitized materials, resulting in research‐based, engaging multimedia stories with scholarly as well as public appeal. They are hosted on the Environment & Society Portal, the Rachel Carson Center’s open-access digital publication platform and archive. It makes environmental humanities research accessible to academic communities and the interested public worldwide. The Portal is accessed by users from every country and has reached more than one million users worldwide.

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    Earth First!

    Earth First! Movement Writings

    The collection "Earth First! Movement Writings" features an expanding archive of journals, pamphlets and other ephemera from the Earth First! Movement and its many offshoots. The environmentalist group Earth First! was founded in 1980 on the idea that every life form and ecosystem has a right to live and flourish regardless of human interests. Shortly after, it began its flagship journal, Earth First! Divergent perspectives within the movement led to new publications such as Wild Earth, ALARM, and Live Wild or Die!, as well as rich ephemera including calls for action, pamphlets, and primers. The collection is compiled by Bron Taylor, who generously donated hard copies of the publications to the Rachel Carson Center. Ephemera is provided courtesy of Bron Taylor. These are available here as full-text searchable PDFs. In his Virtual Exhibition for the Environment & Society Portal entitled "Radical Environmentalism’s Print History: From Earth First! to Wild Earth", Taylor contextualizes this collection while providing an insightful and unique look at the movement and its evolution.