Term: Issue 11: Ecology
Explore all pages categorised under the heading Issue 11: Ecology below.
All categories can be seen on the main index page.
Panama for Indoor Cats
Editing this issue of Panorama has been unexpected. One, I’m rather infamous among friends and the travel writing community for my dislike of nature. It’s...
Accra Ghana Storm
Blessed, my daughter suckles my granddaughter, Maya Ama Konamah, in the bluest chair. Jungle plants on the terrace dance. Skittish stallions across a far expanse.
Remarkable Trees: Biodiversity & Economic Botany
Following the UN’s International Day of the Forest on the 21st March, Julia Knights spoke to Tony Kirkham, one of the world’s leading experts on trees to learn more about...
In Conversation with Mike Challis
My family moved from small town environment in Essex to a Suffolk village when I was 7 and I spent much of my time after...
Greenwood
A handsome, fresh-faced young man in the uniform of a British Tommy stands framed within the front doorway of a beautiful, upper-middle-class country house. He...
Our Ailing Ecology Anthropomorphised
What destroys us is often unclear and obscure. Sickness works in mysterious ways. It takes time to manifest, sometimes years. Entropy advances in a roundabout...
Juma
In the last days of December 2006, news that gold had been found in the Juma basin quickly spread throughout the Amazon, attracting men and...
Backlight
Visual artist and photographic reporter, Guilherme Bergamini is Brazilian and graduated in Journalism. For more than two decades, he has developed projects with photography and...
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art brings together over one hundred artworks by fifty international practitioners, covering the period from the 1960s...
Legion: Life in the Roman Army
The exquisite head of Augustus, Rome’s first Emperor, welcomes you to Legion. It is a wonderful, comprehensive exhibition, which tells the story of the men,...
When Forms Come Alive
When Forms Come Alive, curated by gallery director, Ralph Rugoff, spans over sixty years of contemporary art, featuring twenty-one international artists. Direct representation is mostly...
North Carolina Critters up Close
At the foundation of my work is a respect for nature and the playground it affords us. This respect was instilled at a young age....
Infinite Healing of Nature
The “Infinite Healing of Nature” series is inspired by spending time in nature to rest and rejuvenate from the world’s stresses. After experiencing multiple anxiety...
Lascaux Conversation
Tribe needs food and here you are making art again, again, and again. Claiming to hear animals speak in your dreams, and see visions of...
A Tree in Betla
If I was a tree, I’d most probably be a Mahua tree in the Betla Forest, near Netarhaat, with fat black bears coming to feast...
What I Saw in the Street
Some Might Say That All I’ve Done Is Stack Up a Heap of Objects – Brenda Coultas (A Handmade Museum 2002)
You Can't Take It Back
Only enclose it in a file, default to plan B, leave your mark, sink your fingerprints into fresh soil, or wet cement, rub the match...
Painting 2% of the Earth White Would Stop Global Warming, Scientist Says
The daughter bends over arranges her mother’s treasures creating a commotion of dust motes swinging from sill to bureau. A galaxy.
After the Atlantic
When I arrive in Jamaica, I imagine Grandad growing old. I see him weaving between brightly-coloured roadside shops, smiling and chatting up the neighbourhood. Dark...
Understory
Hanging above my head, Taxol (trade name for paclitaxel, polyoxyethylated castor oil, dehydrated alcohol USP, diluted in sodium chloride 0.9% solution), channels through filtered PVC...
The Monarch Egg
On the omnipotent side of the flying buttresses of the National Cathedral I discover the milkweed stand while the priest passes with a weathered brow...
I Wake up in Istanbul
Freshly stirred sun sprayed on / pink, yellow, orange houses, their spackle / of red roofs like stepping stones to heaven. on the sea /...
A Landscape, Fading
Voice like an ocean, waves throwing the weight of themselves behind their own self-destruction, their shattering laces the surfacing face of the deep. the sea...
Don't call us
“Don’t call us”: Tampa Bay Law Enforcement Asks Beachgoers to Stop Snitching on Horny Manatees. “We can assure you they are more than fine.” (Newspaper...
The Lonely Planet Guide to Death
Nobody travels there without getting there, somewhere beyond the poisoned air, the squalid cities, my loving family living amidst a million cooking fires in the...
Garden Augury
It’s been a week of betrayals: the wind biting, cold penetrating my bones, suddenly reminding me no preparation is ever enough.
Otter Cherita
The gleaming Otter so long straightened meanders now she breathes again – an aged actress loosening her stays
Haibun Self-Portrait
Haibun Self-Portrait ( at Morgan Falls State Park, Less Than a Mile ( 4000 Feet To Be Precise ) From the Once Pristine Chattahoochee River,...
Slant Light
The light of exteriors creates the Arctic Circle swim of silver and blue, recessions of brown and green.
Salamander
Tough going on a forest hike. The brush resisted us as we trailed in a staggering line under second growth, through leaps of young raspberry...
Deep Field
Tonight, you’ve turned away from everything that is not the earth, the moon, the stars.
Special Operation
There were neither bombs nor ruins then, nor the vastness of Russia, nor Ukraine’s wide plains when the devil called God up on his walkie-talkie...
Medea
As patina veils the surface of bronze, so blood veils the maestro’s countenance. Pasolini‘s murder was decreed for attempting to grasp the Golden Fleece.
Knoxville
The second week in May I share a cabin with a wasp. Its nest hangs in the left upper corner of the door, just outside...
Isolation in Iceland
Iceland in winter is the closest one can get to living in eternal night. This country is extraterrestrial; a stretch of solar landscape, rock formations,...
Buenos Aires, Past Subjunctive
On a sunny corner at the heart of the Cementerio de Recoleta sits the graceful Art Deco mausoleum of socialite Rufina Cambaceres. The tour guides...
Ascension
October 1998 – My feet trip on hardened ruts in the earth of the Albuquerque field, and I worry about the cameras dangling from my...
Bensi
After hours of circling endless rice paddies and mountains, we alighted from the bus that had taken us to Pangasinan and took a tricycle to...
The White Boy on the White Continent
The cabin window is covered with streaks of snow and splashes of water from thrashing waves. The ship bobs violently through the stormy Drake Passage...
Travelling with My Father
We’re on a small boat heading out of Port Klang, one of the busiest container ports in the world, the largest port in Malaysia. My...
Do You Know What I Mean When I Write This?
There’s an aching in these hills and wolves that the locals are trying to kill. Their cattle turn clear streams of rainbow trout into dust...
It Can Be Beautiful for Everyone
Near the 405 overpass, lined with plastic dome tents, rusting grocery carts, and litter, a topless woman stands alone in the middle of the street....
Coastal Observations in Three Parts
I pass my neighbours’ houses on my way to the beach. Quiet, nearly everyone at work or school. A cardinal cheeps as he flies off...
A Meditation on Japanese Gardens
Perfectly trimmed pines, cherry blossom petals meticulously swept from beds of moss, frolicking forbidden: public gardens in Japan got me thinking. What do our gardens...
Desert: Southern California and the Sahara
This memoir documents my anxiety—from preteen to adulthood—about desertification in Southern California and the Sahel. My feelings highlight how the natural environment can create a...
Ten Years after Typhoon Haiyan, I Forgot to Tweet about the Disaster
This essay reflects upon my work aiding recovery and interrogates humanitarian work after the Super Typhoon Haiyan disaster in the Philippines, my home country. It...
Seaweed Project
Slippery and glistening, merely one cell in thickness, the kelp throbs with life, clinging on tight to the rocks even with the waves thumping against...
Half a Year at Hollow Marsh
What can the arrival of three semi-wild ponies to a splinter of Somerset show us about the need to slow down, smell the hayfields and...
Stations of the Sun
Performing in Edinburgh’s world-renowned annual ritual theatre show, the Beltane Fire Festival in the mid-90s with a new tattoo of a Pictish Boar on my...
When a Prickly Fruit Becomes the Heartbeat of a Community
My identity is all-embracing. It embraces my hometown trees rustling, the birds visiting my window each morning, and the prickly pear cactus picked, and served...
One Night in Mexico
It is easy to spot the large shell of a loggerhead turtle as she emerges from the white surf of this picture-perfect beach. She begins...
Lessons from the Pandemic Loneliness
Of late, I find myself thinking a lot about time. Perhaps it’s a visceral reaction to the books I am reading. Leafing through the tales...
Doing A Geographical
Half the world’s population of Manx shearwaters—small, albatross-like seabirds—breed on Skokholm, a tiny island off the coast of Wales. Before World War I, two ornithologists...
In the Name of
In one of his many tributes in verse to a mother figure, probably his own, A. K. Ramanujan speaks of the strange attachment she had...
A Screaming Man Is Not a Dancing Bear
Today in 2023 I am in a rowboat, floating quietly down a tributary of the Mekong River Delta. The stalks and green foliage of water...
Beyond the Peel
I didn’t know it then, but this trip marked when a polite colleague became one of my closest friends. On a work call for a...
Ancient America’s Corn Corridor
‘Looks like it’s broken,’ he said pointing to the two holes in the ground. We were having dinner with Benito Treviño and his wife Toni at...
Late Blooming Environmentalist
In this interview, Faith asks Amanda about how travel paved the way for her becoming a late-blooming environmentalist, teaching Reclaiming Nature Writing online, and embracing...
Mother of All Good Things
This month marks the publication of Emily Raboteau’s new essay collection, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse”, from which “Mother of All Good Things”...
Death and Other Possible Futures
The archivist’s hair was bright red, and she had painted in a black streak. She stood out in the Canterbury Museum office, surrounded by neat...
Navigating the Rift
The Great Rift Valley was made up of tracts of grassland and cliffs, corn fields dusted with tan and red earth, and wandering herds of...
Not the Usual Crowd at Fort Mason
Me and the other gentrifiers are on the 22. Our heads buoyed to the rhythm of the bus drivers’ lead foot. I’m lulled into a...
Cartagena
Driving up to the Airbnb, I was mesmerized by the colors, an endless strip of pastel Spanish homes with white shutters and overflowing bougainvilleas. I...
Emergency Alert
The times were tumultuous, sure, but no different from any other. Wars, famine, floods, oppression. Social media clamored with threats of global climate collapse. Roy...
The Land Beyond
You have no idea what to do on your arrival in the city whose name you do not know. You step off the train after...
Still Waters
The ferry towers above Amran, twice the height of the tallest coconut palm, a floating city home to more people than the island his family...
Harmattan Haze
It is a busy afternoon at the craft market in Abuja, where he works. People and scooters trample the withered plants flanking the dirt paths...
Reading is an Ecological Act
The quiet, gentle, sometimes solitary but never lonely act of reading is one of the most radical actions one can take in the modern age....
Waves and Whalesong
‘Intertidal is the part of the shoreline that appears during low tide and is hidden during high tide. In some places it is thin, in...
A Review of Future Imperfect
There is one sentence in Babette Gallard’s novel, Future Imperfect (LightEye 2023), which continues to haunt me: ‘If someone had shown me this future before,...
Our Ailing Ecology Anthropomorphised
The rain hasn’t stopped for years. The continents are fractured, the beachfronts gone. Island nations have perished and the coastlines are lined with treetops, rooftops...
Cold Snap
In December, the valley cars barely turned over. Batteries died. Blankets were coiled on the sills of frosted windows, tacked over ill-fitting doors. Wood split...
Headstrap
This captivating chronicle delves into the untold story of a community that has played a significant role in mountain exploration and climbing in the Himalayas....
Alpine Rising
The name of Maurice Herzog, the first man to reach the summit of Annapurna, is widely recognized, but how many know Ang Tharkay, the Sherpa...
Future Imperfect
The streets are a spider’s web of new tributaries. Everything is under water. Don’t worry about us, but nothing is the same anymore. I was...
Issue 11: Ecology
Welcome to Panorama’s 11th edition. In this issue we turn our attention to ecology—from the word’s earliest roots to present-day ecologies which span people, organisms,...